Wunderground.com - 4/11/13, Ben Fox and Ezequiel Abiu Lopez

PATILLAS, Puerto Rico -- A curtain of sound envelops the two researchers as they make their way along the side of a mountain in darkness, occasionally hacking their way with a machete to reach the mouth of a small cave.

Peeps, tweets and staccato whistles fill the air, a pulsing undercurrent in the tropical night. To the untrained ear, it's just a mishmash of noise. To experts tracking a decline in amphibians with growing alarm, it's like a symphony in which some of the players haven't been showing up.

More: Wunderground.com.

Wunderground.com - Daniel Yawitz, 4/05/13

Seasonal Drought Outook, April 4, 2013. Credit: NOAA.

The outlook for the western half of the U.S. continued to be bleak on Thursday, as forecasters said drought conditions are expected to expand and intensify all across the West and Southwest.

And Texas, which has been in the throes of drought for the better part of two years, may be hardest hit as its bone-dry conditions are expected to continue into summer, leading to shortages of drinking water.

To read the rest of this story, visit Wunderground.com.

Wunderground.com - 3/31/13

BEIJING — Authorities in Tibet said Sunday that chances were slim that any survivors would be found after a massive mudslide at a gold mine buried 83 workers in piles of earth up to 100 feet deep. Searchers have found 11 bodies and were searching for the remaining missing.

The landslide Friday has spotlighted the extensive mining activities in the mountainous Chinese region of Tibet and sparked questions about whether mining activities have been excessive and destroyed the region's fragile ecosystem.
To read the rest of this story, visit Wunderground.com.

Wunderground.com - 2/22/12, Dr. Jeff Masters

Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average for January 2013, the 9th warmest January for the globe since record keeping began in 1880. Colder than average conditions occurred in the Western U.S., northern Canada, and northern Russia. The Southern Hemisphere was record warm over land for the second month in a row, with record high monthly temperatures observed over northeastern Brazil, much of southern Africa, and northern and central Australia. No land areas in the Southern Hemisphere were cooler than average. Image credit: National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).

January 2013 was the globe's 9th warmest January since records began in 1880, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) on Thursday. January 2013 global land temperatures were the 13th warmest on record, and global ocean temperatures were the 8th warmest on record. January 2013 was the 335th consecutive month with global temperatures warmer than the 20th century average and the 37th straight warmer-than-average January.