Research Physical Scientist and Model Physics Branch Chief
@NOAAGSL
. Adjunct Professor
@UWMAtmoSci
. Constantly striving to help those around me flourish.
The Florida Forgotten Coast and Big Bend are some of the most surge-prone areas in the world. The terrain is essentially flat inland a long way from the coast. The NHC’s storm surge maps for a category 4 hurricane show the potential for 6-9+ feet of surge 10 miles inland.
#Idalia
“In Wisconsin…while 62% worry about climate change & support policies, they believe they are in the minority, thinking that only 42% share the same concerns.
In fact, surveys show that the majority of people care about climate change in every county.”
It is with both excitement and melancholy to announce that I've accepted a position with
@noaagsl
in Boulder! I will be leading their model physics development branch in the Earth Prediction Advancement Divisions. I've got much to learn but am excited about the opportunity. (1/x)
I annotated the first of these photos with major roads (blue lines + all-caps white road names) & geographic features (standard-case white text).
The photo was taken just south of Superior, making it a bit easier to identify specific features there vs. Louisville.
#MarshallFire
Just flew over the
#marshalfire
and wanted to share these images in case it helps anyone looking for information on the status of the fire / their property
The first part of this week brought some sad news, but the end of the week brings much happier news: my case for promotion to Professor was unanimously approved this afternoon!
Supporting open science and education, I'm taking a leap and publicly releasing my first-semester Synoptic Meteorology course's labs to the world!
These labs incorporate Jupyter Notebooks (hosted on a local JupyterHub) for meteorological analysis!
Zoomed-in view with a few additional roads and points of interest highlighted. The fire's extent makes it difficult to reliably identify roads in Louisville N of 36. See the quote-tweeted post above for more context.
#MarshallFire
Now that it’s public, I’m excited to share that I’ve been appointed as the
@ametsoc
STAC Incoming Commissioner starting in January! I look forward to working closely with the other commissioners (incl.
@profdesai
), boards and committees, and AMS Council over the next 6 years!
I've updated my list of atmospheric science/meteorology research internship programs for 2021:
STUDENTS: these are a great way to gain research experience while getting paid to do so!
MENTORS: please share and let me know of any programs I've missed!
While much of the discussion surrounding
#Hilary
is rightly focused on its impacts (rain/flooding, wind) to Baja California and the southwest United States, it's also likely to contribute to the excessive heat forecast across the central United States next week. 🧵 (1/6)
The upcoming extratropical transition of
#Fiona
is likely to be an instant warm-seclusion, where it becomes extratropical before losing its low-level warm-core structure. A climatology of these events is in-press with
@MonWeaRev
:
Have you ever felt incredibly angry and incredibly sad at the same time? That’s how I feel right now as my state spirals toward an inevitable, yet completely avoidable, public-health catastrophe. Wreckless.
Everyone else: <gawks at the upscale growth into a bona-fide bow echo>
Me: “That sure looks like a secluding midlatitude cyclone with midlevel dry slot there at the very end of the loop…”
Not going to lie, I'm feeling a bit melancholy after e-mailing my class tonight to fill them in on shifting our class to online delivery for the rest of the semester. I *like* my students and I *like* teaching them! Online just won't be the same.
This is an important analysis that I enjoyed reviewing and am glad to see published. It illustrates the anemic funding support for graduate students across the field. We need to take action to improve this. (1/2)
Young atmospheric scientists, please be assured that people see and appreciate you when you act in kindness, display humility, own your mistakes, and disagree in good faith.
We may not publicly acknowledge those times nearly as often as we should, but we see them. Take heart.
I’m also excited to share my collection of tropical meteorology lectures! These are targeted at jr/sr undergrads and early-stage graduate students. As they are from a one-semester course, some advanced topics are missing. Still, I hope these are useful!
Students - are you looking for a research-based internship this summer, whether an REU program or something at a federal lab? I've compiled an extensive listing of research-based internships on my website:
#AMS2023
#AMSStudent2023
I'm excited to share that I've been appointed as a Trustee of the Village of Grafton, WI! For those who aren't familiar with Wisconsin government, Village Trustees are the equivalent of City Councilors. I was sworn in this morning and I'm excited to get started! (1/3)
Over the last three days prior to landfall, most
@NHC_Atlantic
forecasts of Laura’s track had an error of less than 25 nautical miles (or about 30 statute miles; white-shaded boxes in the left panel). It doesn’t get much better than that.
So, I got an e-mail today titled, "I turned your paper into a song." Turns out, it's legit! The abstract from my 2014
@ametsoc
#WeaForecasting
paper with
@DVDFortyTwo
and
@ToddLericos
was put to music. Why, I don't know. But there's a first for everything!
My neighbors and I made a deal this winter. We’d be gone for 3 weeks in December and they’d shovel snow for us as needed. They’d be gone for 2 weeks in January, and we’d reciprocate.
It snowed a half-inch while we were gone.
It’s snowed almost two feet since they’ve been gone.
It's not lost on me that the $480k cost of this unnecessary UW System "rebrand" could have covered five years of Innovative Weather's operations and thus ~35 students' professional and personal development.
Me, describing today’s SPC forecast evolution to my wife: “It started out as a marginal risk, the lowest of the severe categories, then went through slight to enhanced to moderate risk...”
My wife: “Wait, moderate is higher than enhanced??”
Meteorologists everywhere:
“I don’t want to change who people are or what they believe. It’s a case of showing them that they already care about this — and already believe what they need to in order to make a difference.” -
@KHayhoe
As the students taking synoptic 2 with me this semester will soon learn, I love me a good frontogenetic deformation pattern! Pack those isotherms across the central United States!
(though please keep the 32°F one to my north through Thursday kthx)
Exceptional
@NHC_Atlantic
forecasts for Ida, with both track and intensity forecasts more skillful vs. climatology+persistence than the 2015-19 and 2020 averages. Images from
@HurricaneModels
.
(I’ll get around to adding those curves on the first two plots someday…)
Crazy weather impacts to
@LeTour
this afternoon: a thunderstorm dropped accumulating hail on the road to the final mountain climb of today's stage. Snowplows have attempted to clear the road, but it's not fast enough and the stage has been neutralized. Wow!
In case they're helpful to anyone, I've put together a series of Jupyter Notebooks that use wrf-python (and related packages) to visualize WRF-ARW model output. Some examples follow...
Before any winter storm, I see many AFDs & social-media posts say, “the disturbance is still over the North Pacific and won’t be sampled by radiosondes for X days,” implying that the forecast needs the balloon data to anchor in on a solution. Isn’t that outdated thinking, though?
I decided to use the data from the recent
@Nature
"Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention" article to assess: where did faculty in Atmospheric Sciences & Meteorology at PhD-granting universities receive their PhD?
Top 10 (32.5% of 1525 faculty):
#AMS2024
is the 20th anniversary of my first AMS Annual Meeting - the 84th in Seattle in 2004. I’ve now been attending the Annual Meeting for half of my life(!). I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones this week. Here’s to a great conference!
Following on Tomer's analysis, one can quantify
#Dora
's direct contributions to the wind over Hawaii.
If you take the rotational flow unique to Dora (1st image) you can obtain the wind solely due to that flow (2nd image)! This is done through "vorticity inversion." (1/2)
It may be counterintuitive to associate Hurricane Dora, over 400 miles south of Hawaii, with the Maui fires.
There is in fact a linkage, however - a strong pressure gradient between Dora to the south & strong high to the north resulted in strong easterly low-level wind.
Tropical cyclones interacting with the midlatitude flow can, depending on the nature of that interaction, influence the large-scale weather downstream (generally east) of that interaction.
Keller et al. (2019,
@MonWeaRev
) discusses this in detail: (2/6)
There's more I could say, but I'll close with this: I'm so proud of our students and everything we've been able to do in my 13 years at UWM.
I'm excited about my opportunity with GSL, but deeply sad about the end at UWM. (end)
#AMS2024
Student Conference attendees, please join me after lunch in Rm. 338 for the Conversations with Professionals session! I’m happy to share all about the
#academiclife
,
#gradschool
, my journey, and more!
#Philippe
's track errors were large - but how large were they compared to what you'd expect? Quite large.
The five-year NHC average forecast improvement vs. climatology and persistence is between 45-75% at all lead times. For Philippe, it never exceeded 25%.
Lot of talk about the “map room” in the Synoptic-Dynamic Meteorology session of the Education conference today. My lukewarm take, shared in part by at least one presenter: Twitter is the modern map room.
#AMS2023
Today was the celebration of
@InnovativeWx
’s 17-year legacy, during which it has facilitated the personal and professional development of over 100 atmospheric scientists! Alumni from as far as WA, CO, TX, and GA flew in to attend the event, underscoring IW’s life-changing impact.
Agree 100%. Trust in the NWS among a segment of the population particularly vulnerable to high-impact weather has been eroded as a result of this press release. People WILL be hurt by this. It’s clear, too, that the weather community has lost confidence in top NOAA leadership.
The bottom line via
@afreedma
-- This whole scandal was getting weirder and weirder but now it's getting dangerous if people stop believing NWS forecasts because of this.
This is what disinvestment in the UW System and the young people of Wisconsin looks like. It provided forecast support for Milwaukee City+County DPW, MMSD, We Energies, Milwaukee World Festival, Lake Express, UWM, Marquette, and countless others. It transformed lives and careers.
Apropos of nothing,
#WxTwitter
, but for anyone interested, my synoptic meteorology course notes, examples, and labs are freely available:
Synoptic 1:
Synoptic 2:
Github-hosted labs are linked from these sites. Feedback welcome!
Thanks to the extensive efforts of the Twitterless Michael Vossen, I'm pleased to now share our second-semester Synoptic Meteorology course's labs! These ten labs focus on QG theory, isentropic analysis, & isentropic potential vorticity. Feedback welcome!
Supporting open science and education, I'm taking a leap and publicly releasing my first-semester Synoptic Meteorology course's labs to the world!
These labs incorporate Jupyter Notebooks (hosted on a local JupyterHub) for meteorological analysis!
Updating lecture materials for my Tropical Meteorology class this semester brings this flashback to the time that I used Nermal from the Garfield cartoons to represent an ascending air parcel...
Rather than address the fundamental root of UWM's challenges - the poor-quality education too many students receive, manifest in a 45% 6-year grad rate - campus leadership is instead quietly (for now) cutting programs, even highly successful ones. (5/x)
<log on to Facebook>
<see the local NWS posted about long-term ice cover trends>
Voice inside my head: "don't read the comments..."
<clicks to read the comments anyway>
<immediately regrets having done so>
<types and deletes several responses>
<logs off Facebook>
Sigh.
Congratulations to Dr. Kevin Prince on successfully defending his Ph.D. (and getting the second paper from it accepted for publication in
@AMS_atmos
) this afternoon!
#proudadvisor
Simply saying that the ECMWF and UKMET forecasts were ignored in the forecast-preparation process does not make it true, and quite frankly is insulting to those who made and make those forecasts.
I appreciate Jack sharing this - it’s very well-done. I do think we need to keep working to improve how we teach the math within our courses, not to mention how math is taught from grade school up through college. A few data points…
For every troll who changes their ways after seeing the primitive equations meme, there are a dozen+ bright students scared away from meteorology because they don't think they'll ever be able to understand the symbols.
So here are some of the primitive equations in English.
The paper describing our
#MachineLearning
-based hurricane intensity prediction model and its performance has now officially been published in
@MonWeaRev
! I'm optimistic about what we and/or others will be able to do with more refined/advanced techniques in the future!
The next year looks nothing like I initially hoped or planned, but with UWM's 2020-21 academic year starting Monday, it was so incredibly freeing to be able to change my e-mail signature from "Program Chair" to "(on sabbatical)" this afternoon. Onward and upward!
I agree with
@theweathermanda
. Here's an insider's view - as one who has worked with many undergraduates in an atmospheric science program that is embedded within a math department - to explain why, largely from a philosophical perspective... (1/n)
Off to Phoenix and
#AMS2019
later today. I'm preaching to the choir when I share that it's very disappointing that federal employees won't be able to join us this year, but it's true. Know that despite the social-media trolls, your colleagues across the field support you all.
I'll add my +1 to the growing chorus of attendees indicating that they're overstimulated (and in my case, overwhelmed) after several full days of a virtual meeting. For me, it doesn't help that 1) I've been fighting a stomach ailment and 2) impostor syndrome is raging hard.
The
#MarshallFire
's eastward progress this afternoon has been enhanced by large swaths of dry grassy open space in and west of
#Louisville
and
#Superior
. I hope firefighters are able to keep the fire from getting to the Warembourg Open Space (big open area SE/NE of the two boxes)
As more REU sites begin to accept applications for their Summer 2024 cohorts, I've updated my list of REUs in the atmospheric and related sciences! Please share others I may have missed, and feel free to share with your networks!
I’m happy to have been able to use my professional expertise to help my community as a Trustee. Thanks to
@COweatherman
and the
@Wisconet
for the partnership!
I didn’t expect it to be the front-and-center story in today’s local newspaper, though!
I've been telling people here today that a
#Michael
-like storm could drive water all the way to Tallahassee's southern fringes. Here's the cat-4 projection from the National Storm Surge Hazard Maps; red is 9'+ of inundation. Incredibly low-lying from Franklin->Dixie Co. & beyond.
My friend
@mlgriffinWX1
was telling me this week about how she values having collected good people in her life over the years. It became increasingly apparent thru the week how fortunate I am to have done the same. It was a blessing to share so many great experiences this week.
Fascinating case of thunderstorm reinvigoration as the MCS’s outflow boundary collides with the lake-breeze front in eastern Wisconsin. cc:
@Chasin_Jason
#wiwx
It’s been a fantastic week at
#AMS2020
with family, friends, & colleagues; laying a foundation for research, educational, & society collaborations; and hardcore scienceing. What I cherish the most, though, are our group’s student presentations. They rocked it!
Weather-geek post for the night. I love the quasi-regular spacing of the updrafts/thunderstorms embedded within the MCS across east-central Wisconsin this evening. This isn’t entirely uncommon but stands in contrast to the more contiguous or slab-like structures often seen.
#WIwx
However, it is with a heavy heart that I leave
@UWMAtmoSci
. I couldn't have asked for better colleagues. I've grown so much personally and professionally in my 13 years at UWM, and half of that is directly because of them. (2/x)
A student in my group & I have published on Atlantic hurricane season length (Karloski & Evans 2016,
#JClimate
- ), and the forecast potential for subtropical cyclone development north of the Bahamas this weekend has reignited the debate. A thread: (1/15)
The Atlantic is a bit of an odd bird compared to the Pacific. Subtropical development is a wildcard that makes for inconsistent starts. That said, 99% of hurricane activity and virtually all Cat 3+ storms occur between June and November. Last May hurricane was Alma in 1970.
To be quite honest, I was never looking to leave UWM. Yet, when our Provost indicated that he would not approve replacing the two of our three other faculty members after their retirement in a year, I felt as if I had no other choice. (4/x)
A somber afternoon after hearing of the unexpected passing of Fuqing Zhang, a giant in the field. I & a few others overlapped with him during PREDICT. I have many fond memories of that trip, but none fonder than a personal chat with him on the trip back. He will be dearly missed.
👀
“The NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) invites applications for the establishment of a Cooperative Institute (CI) for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations.”
Is anyone else who attended
#AMS2024
dealing with fraudulent hotel bar charges from the
@Hilton
that the hotel is not addressing? I’ve tried twice now & am getting nowhere.
And to whoever spent $252 at the hotel bar and put my room down on the receipt: I don’t like you much rn.
Looks like my home weather station in Grafton recorded a ~1 hPa blip from the
#Tonga
volcano’s shock/pressure wave earlier this morning.
#wiwx
@NWSMilwaukee
The other half is because of our students. I admire them so much. It has been an absolute pleasure working with and learning from them as their advisor, teacher, or colleague. I hope that I have served them well, and I hope they know that I will always be their champion. (3/x)
I’m looking for 2-3 graduate students to join our team in the fall. Interested in severe storm environments, inland tropical cyclone intensity change, and/or TCs and climate? Contact me!
New paper in press for
@MonWeaRev
led by Ph.D. student Kevin Prince - a climatology of indirect tropical cyclone interactions in the North Atlantic and western North Pacific basins! A short thread…
Neighbor’s tree collapsed in half with the weight of the snow. Sheesh. Got their roof over the garage unfortunately that’s all of the house it got.
#wiwx
#graftonwi
While it is exceedingly rare to see this occur with an eastern North Pacific tropical cyclone,
#Hilary
appears to be an exception. This movie depicts Hilary's upper-level divergent outflow (vectors), trough/ridge pattern (black contours), and winds (blue/red shading). (3/6)