DOW A’s view of the tornado near Saint Libory, NE at 2 different times Image 1: 2211 UTC with eye Image 2: 2213 UTC with debris ball

SPOTTR, guest-starring RaXPol, starts next week! We're knee-deep in preparation and super-excited! To showcase this unique instrument to the public, we've organized an outreach event at Imaginaton Station in Lafayette, IN on 30 May 2026 from 10 am-3 pm! Please share the attached flyer!

Today, the University of Maine's Vice Chancellor for Finance and Strategic AI Integration (who made $243,000 last year) sent UMaine campuses an announcement that we have partnered with OpenAI with a contract for ChatGPT Edu. I sent him the following questions:

Since I can’t be at @fcst70.bsky.social’s retirement celebration this evening, I wrote a thing instead.

“If you get a poisonous snake, it often means that there was a problem with the formatting of your bibliography.”

Gas Station Price Sign Using Scientific Notation

“What changes with practice is our capacity to meet [destabilizing] content with a rational assessment of what we’re looking at, and the ability to act from understanding rather than from the reaction the content was designed to provoke.”

NEWS: House released its FY27 detailed draft budget report doc for science agencies, increasing NWS ops budget by 8%. It would also reject Trump admin plans to eliminate NOAA Research, direct admin not to close any NOAA labs or institutes & increase weather research funds. tinyurl.com/2s4mcd2w

Globe & Mail reporting that the radar scientists supporting EC's new $180M national radar network have been disbanded. They did the work to ensure the 'essential functionality' of the network - providing timely, high-quality data for weather warning decisions. www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/1fa5cdb...

"We stand with the National Science Board, and call on Congress, as an equal branch of government, to rapidly and firmly support science by calling for the reinstatement of terminated National Science Board members and appointment of new ones to fill vacant slots."

New in #Academe: "AI and Critical Thinking" by Heather Hax www.aaup.org/issue/spring...

Happy Mother’s Day to this highly skilled, unpaid, under appreciated, and imperiously scrutinized labor force.

An information vacuum will quickly fill with lies, disinformation, AI slop, and propaganda. This is theft from US taxpayers.

Alan mentioned in this episode the Tornado Debris Signature Detection Algorithm that NSSL developed several years ago. Jeff Snyder and I presented this poster on the algorithm at the 29th SLS conference in 2018 (Stowe, VT):

On Debris Ballers today, I analyzed recent event where there was a tornadic debris signature for several radar scans but a tornado warning was never issued; NSSL was finalizing a TDS algorithm that NWS never adopted, @arthurwitt.bsky.social shared this poster about it. Episode: youtu.be/GSOsUC9fNlc

NWS determined that the damage across southwest MS on Wednesday evening was from a single, long-tracked intense tornado that lasted nearly 2 hours - but thankfully, nobody was killed in spite of the 100s of damaged homes. open.substack.com/pub/balanced...

One of NOAA's true gems - which could be at risk under POTUS' FY27 budget - are its testbeds which test & evaluate NOAA research for how it can improve its operations. I wrote today about my experience participating in a NOAA winter weather forecasting testbed experiment. tinyurl.com/35pua9cc

This letter-writing campaign to restore the radar science team that supports Canada's new radar network has already seen 9200 letters sent. An amazing response! If you haven't sent one yet, please consider it. ECCC's new alert colours are nice. But for severe weather warnings, radar is foundational.

#nationalmeteorologistday May 9. 1st comment explains the origin and why it differs from #nationalweatherpersons day www.forbes.com/sites/marsha...

The toll on the NWS scientists who remain after the DOGE purge still runs very deep. You won’t find a more dedicated group of public servants; however, they remain stretched dangerously thin

Responses due 8 June 2026

Reminds me of: phdcomics.com/comics/archi...

Introducing NSF NCAR’s Medium-Range, Real-Time Convective Hazard Forecasts, a tool leveraging AI weather models to improve predictions of potential tornadoes, hail & damaging winds up to a full week in advance. The experimental forecasts are run daily & are available online. https://bit.ly/3OZJ4fG

Hearing the lead-in as I was pulling into the parking garage, I knew I had to leave the car on and listen. I knew I would hear the fabulous @wxmanms1.bsky.social speaking sensibly about NWS upheaval and its potential impacts on forecast accuracy. And I was not disappointed!

Wow, 3 votes!?! Don't ever let me hear anyone say their vote doesn't matter.

With the Indiana primary election nearly over, I am very much looking forward to NOT receiving these daily glossy mailers that are paid for by out-of-state super-PACs. 🗳️

“Literacy, independent analysis, sustained attention, and tolerance for ambiguity are precisely the capacities that erode in an AI- and algorithm-driven landscape. Democratic life requires a polity capable of independent and nuanced judgment.” www.aaup.org/issue/spring...

I am a college educator and my job, shorn of all the procedural minutiae of the system and the specifics of the domain in which I work Is to help make a young adult into a more rounded, more aware person capable of thinking about more than just survival

It's Emergency Preparedness Week, and your help is needed on a related letter-writing campaign. ECCC has decided to shut down its long-standing radar research program. This affects severe weather warnings, and the work of the NTP and its partners. Details here: actionnetwork.org/letters/reve...

The NYT shared a "success" story of state and local entities filling a flood monitoring gap left by federal budget and staffing cuts. IMO, relying on state and locals for weather and flood services may be in our future - but we should be clear eyed about the consequences. tinyurl.com/4en9zp5y

“The most resource-intensive technology ever built is being used in large part to generate content nobody asked for, read by nobody, saved by nobody, remembered by nobody. An air-conditioned graveyard of text.” substack.com/@samillingwo...

House Commerce, Science & Justice subcommittee approved their FY27 budget proposal which rejects the worst of administration cuts to NOAA, NASA and NSF - but still makes significant reductions over 2026 funding levels. Also, some snow for Colorado - finally… tinyurl.com/7wuk4ae6

13 former NSF directors on the recent ouster of the entire National Science Board: "We face a fork in the road. Do we want to win or concede the race for new knowledge and a competitive STEM workforce? For 75 years winning that race has been the foundation of American prosperity"

UCAR posted its response to the government defense statement with some especially spicy retorts. Hearing is next Thursday. www.courtlistener.com/docket/72496...

If you or someone you know is looking to start a career in the NWS, we've sent out one of the biggest recruiting announcements in a decade. I -highly- encourage you to find someone in the NWS to talk to about applications. The process is significantly changed from years past. Come work with me!

Wow, that memo basically confirms everything we suspected. 1. The intent is to quash “climate” research while maintaining “weather” research (as though they are extricable). 2. It’s a big middle finger to (blue) CO and a nod to (red) WY.

Development in the UCAR lawsuit: the defense filed their response to the allegations last week. Essentially, their argument is that because NSF has not ordered NCAR broken up, just that they *intend* to break up NCAR, an injunction is not appropriate at this time.

On Weatherbrains this week, @ounwcm.bsky.social (in his characteristic Rick Smith way) gently rebuffed a suggestion that NWS should take live-streamers’ suggestions for trimming or changing warnings in real time. Start at 58:34: www.youtube.com/live/387zB3P...

In ~8 weeks, our team (myself + others in WoFS team) has been able to stand up an experimental next-gen WoFS system AND implement backwards compatibility to test WoFSCast, the AI/ML emulator to WoFS v1. They both not only run, but do so in realtime for SFE evaluation. We damn did it. I’m speechless

“You cannot audit randomness. You cannot write a policy around unpredictable failure. You cannot train a human to spot errors that do not follow a pattern.”

“I have watched the systematic dismantling of the scientific advisory infrastructure of this government with growing alarm, and the National Science Board is simply the latest casualty.”

The National Science Board has had staggered six-year terms since 1950, by design. On Friday all 24 members were fired by email. The next board meeting is May 5. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

I resigned from the National Science Board in May when meaningful oversight became untenable. I respect colleagues who stayed to serve the NSB's mission. Today's news clarifies that was an erosion of oversight and function has become open elimination of the Board itself. 🧵 time.com/7285045/resi...

“Other federal agencies are precisely the ones most exposed to political control… Their priorities shift with each administration. The whole reason NSF’s structure is unusual is that the postwar designers did not want science funding to work that way.” www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

“It unfortunately is no surprise a president who has attacked NSF from day one would seek to destroy the board that helps guide the Foundation. Will the president fill the NSB with MAGA loyalists who won’t stand up to him as he hands over our leadership in science to our adversaries?”

Lest this ham-fisted authori-gasm get lost in the other news du jour… The NSB is one of the last bastions of scientific integrity in the federal government. It’s disastrous, but unsurprising that T**** decided to sweep the board clean, because he knows he’s not smart enough to outmaneuver them.

Master of the craft!

We’ve been talking about how we would show this counterfactual (which is, of course impossible) 1. Find an analog case or cases with 100% sondes 2. Run a control simulation assimilating all sondes 3. Systematically deny all possible combos/permutations of sondes to see which have max impact on fcst

After a quiet start to April, Debris Ballers are back recapping the last week, including a discussion of the "surprise" KC event and potential impact of missing upper air data. But the real highlights are hearing John Gordon talk about briefing Special Forces & meeting my dog. youtu.be/NZSCgJmc79k

Last month, an NWS office lost comms for hours during a severe weather episode, forcing another office also dealing with severe weather to handle services for two offices - agency infrastructure and staffing vulnerabilities run much deeper than just upper air balloons. More: tinyurl.com/nbw2mvse