So odd to talk this way 10 long years into dystopia. Is it just for easy in-tribe kudos or what? The top comments on fauxnewsdotcom are calling for his execution with thousands of upvotes. "I like pilots that weren't captured" was 2015. "Honor & duty" are about as culturally jarring now as disco.

Wall to wall pillars north during a substorm Tuesday evening in the Wichita Mountains, OK

Compulsively refreshing The Other Platform for solar storm info and thinking about how cooked we are if *nothing* the past year convinced a critical mass to abandon it... even in science niches. The future of the internet and digital communication looks impossibly bleak.

Reds and greens reflecting off lakes in the Wichita Mountains of SW OK - likely a sight you can go a whole solar cycle without. 03:55 UTC on 2025-11-12. #okwx

The local Wichitas coyotes were audibly impressed by the 1050p CST substorm.

Consolation prize for what's coming the next 48 hours. It's been a minute since the stars have aligned for central OK to pull this off without horizon interference.

Another sunset view off the Grand Mesa in W CO from late September.

Caught sunset with the many layers and colors of the Colorado Grand Mesa near peak a couple weeks ago.

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.