Map showing the coldest season of the year.

Ended up getting this working quite a bit better! Here's a few more: 4294 + 4296, 3664, 4294 + 4292, 4290 + 4291 Surprised it's doing a pretty good job of picking up only umbra/penumbra! Not perfect but better than I expected!

Bored today so I put some time into building an automated sunspot detection/measurement script. Not perfect but does a decent job I think! Also really, really nice to be able to overlay it on magnetometer data like that.

An absolutely tremendous active region has rotated into view over the past few days. It is huuuuuuuuge! Very excited to see what sort of geomagnetic incidents this thing sends our way in the next two weeks or so. Can't forget former 4274 peeking around the NE too! Two intense solar regions at once!

Been having fun watching SDO imagery today... lots and lots of action on the limb!

From 4/27/2011, a short multi-tilt storm-following loop from ARMOR of the Hackleburg tornado. Some pretty incredible temporal resolution is possible like this when you interleave the different tilts! You get some shakiness but overall this turned out quite incredible. Love the merger stream!

Also a short time lapse video of the proton aurora being extraordinarily bright and dynamic!

Anyone else get absolutely dazzled by the ridiculous amount of proton aurora on 11/11? All night it was showing up in very quick bursts!

Cannot get over how magical and surreal this picture looks. A very sharp contrasting line between the incredible auroral crimson and the black night sky. This was taken looking west around 10:49 PM from central MO.

Goodbye Banzai, my friend, best buddy, and family member of the past 14ish years. Huge hole left in my heart right now :(

Probably my favorite aurora photo from 11/12.

Finally got around to skimming through my DSLR pics! The first one with the crazy proton aurora is actually the very first DSLR photo I took of the night. Absolutely insane to have captured this collection of photos from Missouri!

Some of my favorite shots from 11/11, taken from east central MO. Some of these from my front yard. Going to be pretty hard to ever see a better aurora event from my house than this one! The colors were insane, and everything was so excessively naked-eye visible!

The greatest atmospheric ballet! Large, highly visible snow mesovortices rolling down a convergence band over Lake Michigan on 2024/01/19. Perhaps the most beautiful radar data NEXRAD has ever produced. This is a 14 hour loop showing the ridiculously high number of them that developed sequentially

@twisterkid34.bsky.social Just curious, with the new paper in WAF, do you now have a storm event DB with mode classifications/metadata that is requestable? Sure would be incredibly useful for some projects I want to work on (though unfunded personal projects analyzing existing data in newish ways)

Storm-following, multi-tilt, multi-radar loop of the tornado event from 2015/05/06, as seen by KTLX and ROP4 (KCRI). Spliced-together loops like this give us a pretty incredible look at the motions going on that often gets lost between sweeps!

Storm-following (vortex-following where possible) loop of the Duke, OK tornado from 2024/05/23! Including its beautiful development from a huge hook echo and subsequent dramatic occlusion through the precip core. Used tilts 0.5°/0.9° for this one, 1.3°+ made it worse.

Another python-generated storm-following loop, this time 6 hours of the Mayfield supercell from 2021/12/10! Imperfect, dealiasing wasn't amazing, and the plot format needs some decrapulating but overall happy with it! Surprised the motion vectors kept it so centered!

4-Radar Multi-Tilt Storm-Following loop of the 2013/05/20 Moore, OK Tornado. Splicing together multiple radars gives us some pretty crazy temporal resolution, even if it's a bit... spazzy. Been having fun with my new script! bsky might mangle the quality of this video, so apologies in advance!

Some storm-following loops from 2012/03/02, plotted by my python script utilizing multiple tilts to get slightly more temporal resolution! In this post: West Liberty EF3

A couple of shots of Lemmon from tonight! Trying to figure out what sorta edit I like best. Feels like I was pretty wildly successful with my photo shoot though! <3

One of my Lemmon shots for the night. Second comet ever, this one was fun! Very happy with the pics

So I tried my first shots of some nebula (well technically second, but I completely missed my first attempt) this morning, and this is what came from the stack. Was very much not prepared. Still some processing to be done but damn I am excited I even got this far!

Appears to have been a couple tremendously weak tornadoes near Cannel City, KY 20 or so minutes ago! Pretty clear TDS's, although low reflectivity and low velocity makes me think these are probably non-damaging tornadoes picking up leaves and stuff. Still worth watching out for more!

Some good hail in that storm near Tulsa! A pretty impressive hail spike combined with azimuthal side lobe seems to indicate there's either big hail, a lot of hail, or both! Seems that right now ~1" hail has been dropping.

Decided to put together a vortex-following loop of the Enderlin tornado. Turned out kinda neat -- love the way the mesocyclone got passed to the next supercell and the squall line and they all combined to produce the EF2 immediately after.

OK I decided to give astrophotography a try. I bought a new lens and a tracker mount and my expectations were set far too low. This is my first ever stacked astro shot. I couldn't have even remotely expected anything half as good

Yesterday was surely the best Wednesday of the year... Weds AM: Highly appealing fiery sunrise! Weds PM: Even fierier sunset with glowing mammatus-esque clouds Weds midday: Not one, but TWO instances of contrails transiting the sun, casting shadows, VERY dynamic clouds, AND A HALO!

Incredible TDWR loop showing a beautifully appealing slow-rolling boundary collision that ultimately results in an entire line of storms convecting at once! Love this stuff -- you usually see this out in the plains, not Florida!

A fun forgotten radar loop from 2021/09/02! Here we see a supercell in the salt lake city region develop a large area of rotation and a quite striking hook as it travels ENE over the TSLC radar. More interesting is the outflow that "bounces" off the mountains as it passes!

Delta-VWP loop of a strong squall line and bookend vortex crossing over the KMOB radar on 2022/03/30. Love to see the impact the squall line has on the VWP hodo, both before and (obviously) after it crosses over.

Looks like we got 3 new NSSL MPAS configs! I'm most excited to see results with RN3 because its utilizing the NSSL triple moment microphysics scheme which tmk, is the 1st time a triple moment scheme has been used operationally in a model! Props to @ksquared812.bsky.social @tedmwx.bsky.social and co!

My frens :3

@techconnectify.bsky.social You ever thought about doing an episode on mod/con boilers? Seems like your forte!

Radar-derived VWP hodograph loop as the storm complex crossed over the KOAX radar today, along with delta-hodograph. I find the large delta in the low levels prior to arrival of winds very interesting -- signifies all the northerly low level winds at the start were completely washed out.

Storm-following loop of the MCS that went through Nebraska this morning, producing prolific wind reports (up to 91mph!) in a narrow swath from KUEX to KOAX.

VWP progression loop (with delta-hodograph) of a squall line passing the KGWX radar on 2025/02/16. Delta-hodograph is showing the change in hodograph from the initial frame.

Some photos from my drone survey of the Pratt-Plavna tornado last night

Storm-following loop of the wild supercell near KLBB tonight! Mergers, interactions, occlusions, and cycles give this storm a crazy motion as it zigzags south, alternating between SW and SE. Not to mention that merger at the beginning is CRAZY cool to watch.

Incredible super-refraction radar artifacts last night south of KLCH. An offshore inversion seems to have caused KLCH to scan waves on the ocean, giving a wild psychedelic looking show to anyone bored enough to be watching at the time. Coolest radar loop I've made, honestly!

Any of y'all ever worked with Fermi GBM data? I'm working on a project on dark lightning/terrestrial gamma-ray flashes and this data is completely foreign to me. Would love any guidance!

Also, genuinely, don't lose hope. Things get better. There will be a bounce-back and an upside to all this eventually... and judging by the current modus operandi I don't think it's distressingly far off. It will be okay.

Hope y'all are annoying the crap out of the people that can actually push back against this stuff. We saw pushback lead to unfirings in a few other departments, the only chance of unfucking this is to bother the shit out of your representatives (respectfully, though).

Valley View's track/polygons have been updated. If BlueSky doesn't gloop up this gif too bad, you might be able to see it

Just showing off my lightning plotter a little bit more! Saw this bolt captured on KMOB and decided to run it through my plotter. Bolt was FAR larger and more complex than I expected. Radar only picked up a tiny bit of it due to timing of the beam itself, presumably. This is the kinda stuff I love

Some lovely plane-effect snow from 2025/01/25 near Denver! Atmospheric conditions want to produce snow but there's nothing to crystallize onto. When a plane flies through, it helps the snow crystallize and you end up with lines of snow following flight paths!

I have this dorky project I want to work on... Collecting photos of contrails, taxonomizing them into different varieties, and looking at atmospheric conditions that makes different types favorable. Probably has absolutely no scientific purpose whatsoever, but it sounds fun I think?

Unusual contrail shadow effects today! At a glance, the light source for the shadow looks to be behind me. However, the sun is of course also in the image and not behind me. Instead, the contrail is being projected onto a lower cloud layer giving this cool effect. Love it!

I have actually no memory of taking this photo. But there it is, in my photos. I'm glad I took this photo, though

Some more plots from my lightning plotter. Rare case where two separate radars scanned the same lightning bolt complex at the exact same time (down to the second). One of my favorites I've plotted so far!