Random thought of the day: Centralized, convenient, authoritarian, manipulated, low quality (X, Meta, Reddit) always wins and marginalizes Decentralized, slightly inconvenient, democratic, organic, high quality (BlueSky, Mastodon, web forums) Seems to sum up the entire history of the internet.

New thought after seeing latest POI photo: After that oval address, and with FBI in charge... is there any scenario where perp turns out to be someone apolitical or on the right, and that info is accurately relayed to the public? That I can't really imagine it shows again how far gone we are.

POTUS gives address explicitly blaming "leftists" while manhunt is ongoing and no suspect ID'd. Then rattles off list of political violence that excludes the most recent major incident - MN in June - which saw 4 D *legislators*/family shot. You know, actual direct political violence/intimidation. 1/

The Gary, SD, tornado on 6/28/25 settled into a state of laminar perfection starting a little over halfway through its life cycle.

As a TL cleanse from today's photogenic Dakotas bonanza, here's Gary 6/28 (so 7 Dakotas bonanzas ago?) around its peak drillbit stage.

Wide shot of the 6/28 Gary monster shredding trees north of SD-22 with easily the loudest roar I've heard firsthand.

The 6/28 Gary, SD, tornado reaches peak 🐍 just before crossing Hwy 22.

The Gary, SD, storm on June 28 appeared smaller than most tornadic supercells I've seen on the Plains -- more in line with the summertime minisupercells Iowa and other parts of the upper Midwest are famous for.

A few highlights from the initial Clear Lake, SD, storm on 6/28/25. This was about 90 minutes before the Gary monster developed with a new, trailing storm just a few miles away.

The transition from NAM/HREF to any unified ensemble is destined to draw groans, right or wrong. Why? Because HREF (originally SSEO) essentially stumbled into a ton of useful ensemble spread by combining independently developed early CAMs. Shameless plug: journals.ametsoc.org/view/journal... 1/

RFD gust front surging and busting out the old whale's mouth look yesterday evening near Leedey, OK.

Doubtful there's any perspective of the Amistad NM beast from June 7 that's not already been spammed far and wide, but here's my best attempt.

Four frames covering 2 hours (6:50-8:50p) and all of 15 miles around Hydro #okwx yesterday evening, June 14.

Dems In Disarray (Probably the actual lead on Fox tonight)

Slapout, OK, supercell from the evening of Wed 5/28, right before it bowed out too much to fit in my 14mm frame.

A year ago tonight: something close to the best auroral show you can get in central Kansas. This third substorm around 4:30am featured unbelievable blue pillars.

Unidata maintains a lot of key weather data infrastructure, including the netCDF data standard and libraries, metpy. data dissemination servers for accessing models and observations from NOAA, and educational resources for the university community. Now everyone is furloughed b/c of Trump and DOGE.

Classic elevated but sculpted supercell ingesting very large SRH near Monahans, TX, this past Sunday 5/4.

Looks like real time severe wx from the field has officially failed to make the BlueSky jump for this spring. Extremely disappointing, but IMO there's no way to justify actively contributing at the other place as it fuels the acute downfall of western civ.

This would kill all weather model development - RRFS, HAFS, and WoFS - in NOAA. These are activities that the private sector can’t support; they leverage these models to train & benchmark their own. I wish the headline didn’t just focus on climate as it limits the audience who will listen.

The Onion has been redundant for a decade.

It's the fundamental problem of news in the SM age: The past was bad bc elite gatekeepers controlled most public info, and sometimes abused that power. The present might be worse bc the gatekeepers have been slayed... and our own dopamine system exerts a far more damaging power over our info diet.

I don’t think a lot of people outside science understand the symbiotic relationship we have between public, private, and educational sectors. We all lean on each other for help, support, and R&D. In most cases, we aren’t competing so much as all rowing different boats in the same direction.

This period under Musk/Trump feels like early February in 2020—when a terrible thing was happening with breakneck speed, and the people paying close attention were hair-on-fire about it while the rest of the country carried on as normal.

Can't stop thinking about how disastrously the stream-of-headlines mode of news delivery fails in times like these. We need a single, digestible, continuously updating hub of info on the ongoing govt takeover -- not new stories bumping down old ones every hour.

This moment appears too big for the modern press. We're living in an information dystopia. The ongoing domestic assault by private actors on the federal govt is a 5-alarm fire that should be wall-to-wall everywhere. But chyrons and headlines continue shifting hourly to chase the newest squirrel.

Recording of this session where the Oklahoma HB2426 "storm chasing bill" was introduced is up here (see 10:44-10:58 AM timestamps): sg001-harmony.sliq.net/00283/Harmon...

- New OPM chief is straight from xAI - OPM senior advisor was "integral" to gutting Twitter - Two other new top OPM appointees are a 21-year-old and an 18-year-old (straight out of HS) who WIRED doesn't feel comfortable naming www.wired.com/story/elon-m...

The irony is that the early internet HAD a much closer approximation of virtual communities: subject-driven forums and niche websites. We (mostly) willfully abandoned those to chase virality and followers on generic corporate, algorithm-fueled cesspools. We make it way too easy for the oligarchs.

Guess there's a first time for everything, including drifts on the south side of buildings in #okwx.

TLDR: gigantic physician salaries (2-5x W Europe) are a big part of the US HC crisis. Quite depressing in that, like w/ guns, we dug a very deep hole long ago. The whole ecosystem of med school tuition, salaries, etc. is pegged to current system. Merican Exceptionalism. www.vox.com/policy/39003...

Our modern media environment is terminally helpless against the deliberate "anything to put me at the center of the news cycle" style of grifting. It's likely core to how we got Trump in the first place. Mace has so obviously employed this strategy for years with zero underlying convictions.

This long lived, boundary riding supercell dropped S through Midland-Odessa on May 30, with impressive but borderline HP structure. A cone is technically visible here, but it might as well be Where's Waldo? thanks to the hail-filled notch that kept me in structure mode all day.

The Energizer supercell on 19 May 2024 near Hammon, OK. Initiated in the TX Panhandle mid-afternoon, and was still spitting out tornadoes in the dark 6 hours later over OKC.

The Hollis Mesonet's 9.24" from Nov 1-8 is eye-popping for an area of the state that's typically desolate in the cool season. But how eye-popping? One week in, the entire NOV-FEB period for 2024-25 -- 1/3 of the year -- already has more precip than any other cool season since 2000-01. 😶

This seems... significant (#1 - current, #2 - 2020). Either because there's a giant shift in the final result, or because early/mail ballots were biased in the opposite direction of 2020.

After a weekend of disgusting QLBS activity across the OKC area, it was nice to be reminded we're still in the Plains this evening.

All-night aurora timelapse from this year's second historic show: 10 October 2024. Shot in central Iowa. 4K version: youtu.be/f28rV1N0e10

Pillars briefly appeared to move almost directly overhead near Story City, Iowa (42°N) during the dusk substorm on 10 October 2024. Props to the Milky Way for making a cameo in the background.

The long-lived Hawley, TX, tornado on 2 May 2024 was the highlight of my personal chase season this spring. As happens so often, it came on a low-key setup. Its appearance at times echoed the Harper/Crystal Springs tornado from the legendary cyclic supercell of 29 May 2004.

Belated spring storm dump: 26 April 2024 from Tennant to Minden to Harlan, IA. An outbreak so intense you could weather a series of stunningly poor decisions and still come away with this. It required effort not to see a sig tor in the area this day.

In the spirit of being constructive, check out @stormtrack.bsky.social (stormtrack.org) as a throwback to better times without the performative, brand-building, virality-chasing dynamics bemoaned herein. Especially worth a shot if your activity here is heavy on the severe wx/chasing niche.

Lots of angst around abandoning a "following" that took X years to build and such. May I humbly submit that one way to make the new place better than the old one is to treat it more as simply a forum for cool shit, and less as a brand-building exercise (with a likely $0.06/follower net return)?

#aurora timelapse from the Flint Hills of Kansas (38°N) back on the night of 10 May 2024. Full 4K version: youtu.be/XGJcj5zIVHI

Three auroral substorms from ~35°N in Oklahoma within 27 hours, each more intense than the last: 9:30pm 10/6, 9:30pm 10/7, 12:00am 10/8. SAR arc overhead for final substorm.

Absolutely whack rainfall distribution for the S OKC metro this summer. While drought expanded regionally, we've picked up a fairly normal 13.1" locally since early June. But it would've been only 1.8" if without just 3 big flooding days (1.78" on 7/7, 5.48" on 8/11, and 4"+ today).

A year ago today: two majestic High Plains tornadic supercells near the CO/KS/OK corner, which was outside the 2% contour at lunchtime. Almost as good as it gets. The euphoria at the end of a day like 6/23/23 pays off the thousands of miles of drudgery from the other 90%+ of conditional setups.

Yesterday's stovepipe tornado northeast of Eldorado, OK, as seen from its damage path on OK-34 where it crossed moments earlier.