Brief aurora display here on the east side of Madison, WI. Visible to naked eye in color but not as vivid as these photos

Trump just continually shooting our country in the face. This unwarranted (and likely illegal) destruction of Goddard is madness. It jeopardizes the next several decades of space exploration.

📢The Anemoi training-ready ERA5 dataset is now openly available! A ready-to-use, ML-optimised subset of ERA5 in cloud-friendly Zarr format, hosted by ECMWF and free under CC-BY-4.0. Read the AIFS blog: ➡️ www.ecmwf.int/en/about/med...

We're hitting the road with the State Climate Office! 🚗 To understand the local impacts of weather and climate in rural communities, we're planning a 3-part roadshow across the state. First stop, the Northwoods! 🌲 Learn more and register for free here: climatology.nelson.wisc.edu/roadshow/

Saw @neighbortunes.bsky.social and Kyle Hollingsworth band at High Noon Saloon in Madison, WI this past Friday night. Small crowd, but incredibly awesome show, highly encourage to go check out either band if they are in your area. Thanks again for playing Madison, had a fabulous time!

Please join us for Weather Watch at 12:15 PM CDT (1715 UTC) today, October 24, 2025, streaming online at go.wisc.edu/uwaos-wxwatch Remember that we are starting at 12:15 PM this semester because there is a class in the room right before Weather Watch. Hope to see you there!

Layoff notices at JPL are going out today. About 11% of the Lab, or 550 people, are being let go. I'm thinking of my friends and colleagues there, some of whom will still be employed after today and some of whom won't. I'm sorry you're having to deal with this.

Anticipating steep cuts to its budget, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, one of the world’s leading climate research centers, has laid off 29 employees and decided not to fill 21 vacant positions. https://scim.ag/46yaM9g

NEW! Dept of Education workers say their OOO replies were forcibly changed to blame Democrats for shutdown. When employees changed their responses back to the more neutral language, it changed yet again to the partisan response. @wired.com @leahfeiger.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/govern...

NEW—US Department of Education sent out standard Out of Office language to employees on Wednesday in light of shutdown. Later yesterday, workers tell me they found someone had updated their auto-responses without consent to a new one blaming Democrats. Version of original on left, updated on right:

Just a reminder that NWS is considered essential during a government shutdown. Meteorologists will still go to work, forecasts will still be made, watches and warnings will be issued, data will flow. We won’t be paid until the shutdown ends, but we’ll still protect life and property as always.

I recognize that significant impacts from #Imelda are still possible without a direct landfall, but it's curious that the @accuweather.com track makes landfall while the NHC forecast keeps the storm offshore. Your annual reminder to trust the experts at NHC & NWS.

Please join us for Weather Watch at 12:15 PM CDT (1715 UTC) today, September 19, 2025, streaming online at go.wisc.edu/uwaos-wxwatch Remember that we are starting at 12:15 PM this semester because there is a class in the room right before Weather Watch. Hope to see you there!

Please join us for Weather Watch at 12:15 PM CDT (1715 UTC) today, September 12, 2025, streaming online at go.wisc.edu/uwaos-wxwatch Remember that we are starting at 12:15 PM this semester because there is a class in the room right before Weather Watch. Hope to see you there!

My lab's been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up. NYT just covered it. 1/n www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...

Please join us for the first Weather Watch of the semester at 12:15 PM CDT (1715 UTC) today streaming online at go.wisc.edu/uwaos-wxwatch - note that we are starting at 12:15 PM this semester because there is a class in the room right before Weather Watch. Hope to see you there!

Hadn't looked at upper level obs maps in a while. With our Weather Watch discussion starting tomorrow I took a quick look to make sure they were working right and whoa, did not realize how many obs are no longer there.. yeesh.. not great Bob.. whirlwind.aos.wisc.edu/~wxp/upperai...

Watch: 📺 🖥️ 💻 📱 @uwmad-aos.bsky.social Wisconsin State Climatology Office outreach specialist Amanda Schwabe considers how people experience the variability of daily and seasonal weather as climate change shifts broader patterns over time.

Anthony Bernal Ayala, PhD ’25, is part of NSF’s ICECHIP field campaign. Their work will produce the most extensive database of hailstones to date, linking the small-scale details contained within them to large-scale field observations, giving researchers new insights into the hailstone lifecycle.

New AMS statement outlines five foundational flaws that make the Department of Energy's Climate Synthesis Report "inconsistent with scientific principles and practices." Read the full statement: https://bit.ly/3UQRC82

NSF Unidata runs on community ideas, input, and energy! Meet the new folks joining our advisory committees this fall: buff.ly/2RF27zY

UW-Madison AOSS Rooftop Camera video from this past Saturday with two spectacular gust front / arc cloud passages, and lots of turbulence right behind them youtu.be/OfgKADhyET0

Finally pushed a full 1.0.0 (not release candidate) to PyPI and conda-forge. This also means that: mamba install sharplib conda install sharplib Work now (assuming you have conda-forge set as your primary channel). There is also now a Dask/Xarray/kerchunk example notebook for HRRR data!

The @ametsoc.org State of the Climate Report for 2024 is now published: doi.org/10.1175/2025... I am happy to have contributed again to this year's issue - see our section in 'The Arctic' chapter: doi.org/10.1175/BAMS... Another historic year for Earth's climate... 🚨

AOS professor Hannah Zanowski joined The Larry Meiller Show to talk about the role of oceans on Earth and other planets. Have a listen!

These are the most challenging times for early-career scientists and engineers. My team is doing its bit to help by maintaining and even expanding our database of funding opportunities for early-career researchers. We found 437 of them. Download it freely here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

This morning, ICE rolled into a Home Depot parking lot using a moving truck loaded w/agents, like a Trojan horse, to snatch up Latino workers. Whoever they could find. No idea if they were undocumented or not. That’s not enforcement. That’s racial profiling, and violates a standing court order.

Stormy scenes this morning as captured by our east-facing rooftop camera.

Hosting a fully virtual MS talk this morning, and having some serious COVID era déjà vu..

BREAKING: Scientists are staging a “science fair” in the lobby of a Congressional building to tell elected officials about the critical knowledge the US will lose because their research grants have been canceled.

NEW: Commerce Dept just sent out a policy change that all probationary employees will now simply be terminated at the end of their probationary period UNLESS a "Deciding Official" — in coordination with the unit's "most senior political appointee" — says the position "advances the public interest."

As of today, all current NOAA Climate and Global Change postdoctoral fellows have been furloughed due to the Dept of Commerce not releasing the funding for the program. In addition no new Fellows were awarded this year. cpaess.ucar.edu/cgc

NEW: in the wake of devastating floods in tx, some officials say NWS forecasts weren't sufficient enough to warn them, while others are warning that DOGE cuts may have made predictions less accurate. meteorologists told me: NWS did a solid job with the forecasts around this storm

There have been claims that NOAA/NWS did not foresee catastrophic TX floods--but that's simply not true. This was undoubtedly an extreme event, but messaging rapidly escalated beginning ~12 hrs prior. Flood Watch mid PM, "heads up" outlook late PM, flash flood warnings ~1am.

Recent federal cuts to weather operations have contributed to a 22% "critical vacancy" rate for the San Antonio NWS office. It's too early to determine whether these vacancies played a role; I've seen solid arguments in both directions (e.g. theeyewall.substack.com/p/making-sen...). However ...

I took a different approach to telling the forecast in today's newsletter. I may not have the opportunity in every 2-minute TV update, but it's a small thing to add to my articles. I hope others will consider similar strategies to underscore what's at stake.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

this budget is a crime, it’s theft of time and talent and decades of work, it’s theft of the future science we deserve, it’s just unconscionable that anyone would even propose this

Thankfully, it cannot be fully erased from the public, for an archive of the 5th National Climate Assessment can be found here: web.archive.org/web/20250617... 🧪

From Madison Magazine: Recent uncertainty about the future of local TV meteorologists has the community evaluating how we hear about critically important weather events.

I just want to say for the record that when the history books are written centuries from now, I believe the election of Donald Trump in a free and fair election in 2024 will go down as one of the most senseless and self-destructive own goals in human history

👀 Scoop: Trump and Republicans want USPS to sell off its brand new EVs and chargers. That would mean literally **ripping up post office parking lots** to auction off assets with no private-sector value. It’s buried in the Senate’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Breakthrough blood test detects cancer years before symptoms appear

Please read and share this statement from Sophie and Colin Hortman, children of Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark. (via WCCO reporter Caroline Cummings on X)

Aerosols play a significant role in cloud formation, weather, and climate, but they’ve historically not been factored into forecasts as highly as other parameters. AOS Prof. Mayra Oyola-Merced hopes to change that. Learn more: lsmagazine.wisc.edu/issues/sprin...

I just wanna say something really plainly that I haven’t seen spelled out like this There is no such thing as legal immigration anymore. Because they are taking people at their citizenship hearings they are taking people who are doing everything by the book. 1/2

Every major Dem politician needs to realize that, in this environment, they can schedule a "speech to the nation," like Newsom did, and get tons of media coverage. Just do it.

Reporters: stop saying Los Angeles is under curfew. Downtown is under curfew. That is a small part of Los Angeles. Everyone else is going about their regularly scheduled lives out in the open and rolling their eyes at all of this.

Speak up. It’s easy.