Views from lifetime Bear Peak summit 99. Faint glory conditions apparently existed.

A stunning morning on the Boulder trails with our long awaited drought relief. It was surreal hearing hummingbirds zooming by in heavy snow conditions.

A stunning morning on the Boulder trails with our long awaited drought relief. It was surreal hearing hummingbirds zooming by in heavy snow conditions.

Rabbits enjoying the holiday cheer a bit earlier. The ground has become quite a bit whiter since then.

This is the best weather event of 2026 so far in Erie.

May snowstorms are not at all uncommon along the Front Range, but I think the record shattering warm and dry winter and spring has made the hype for this (potential) one unprecedented. Of course, the fully leafed out trees are not going to be happy.

Arapaho Peak and its fancy new coat of snow.

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.

An impressive supercell east of Colorado Springs right now!

Supercell structure on Thursday's N OK storm I had missed tornadoes on (from the SLR). Putting aside the pangs of grief in missing the ground show, the show aloft was a memorable experience nonetheless.

Agitated cu in Wichita.

Classic April weather for our moist month before heading into the dry inferno of summer heat domes.

Duh, no. It’s a wind instrument.

The REU was a pivotal point in my education, as I was trying to decide between a career in the National Weather Service and research. There have been an utterly exhausting number of devastating losses to US science in the last 15 months. The folks who led this REU should be so proud of their legacy.

Want to learn more about METplus?! Come join John, Tina, and me at the RAL seminar series on Wednesday, April 22nd at 1pm MT, in person (FL2-1022) or virtual! 🌎📊

A waterspout just moved over Puget Sound and was visible from Seattle. It appeared to be spawned by a mesoscale convective vortex. Source: imgur.com/a/seattle-wa...

A friend of mine in Madison snapped these photos earlier of the tornado warned supercell that had damaging hail over the city.

This would have been one of my best shots of a multivortex tornado if the power lines and roadside trees hadn't been in the way. Things were evolving too quickly, though, to set up a good shot. (Elkhorn, NE, 4/26/24).

Happy cold-core tornado event in Wakeeney, Kansas day, to all who celebrate.

Today is the 21-year anniversary of this cold-core tornado event in Wakeeney, Kansas.

1-minute Visible images + GLM Flash Points + Fire Mask derived product from @noaa.gov #GOESEast (GOES-19) captured 2 lightning-ignited wildfires (which produced small smoke plumes) in Oldham County, Texas (northwest of Amarillo). #TXwx

Hate to see it, but it always feels good when a forecast verifies. Kind of in a bad spot along the Canadian River. re-ngfs-pub.ssec.wisc.edu/s/z1eCj

This animation appears to capture ignition of a wildfire, followed by a northbound smoke plume. (TX PH)

When you try to do a thunderstorm timelapse and it becomes about the cat.

A brief but brilliant display of sunset awe this evening.

BREAKING: Following the American threat of an “Avignon Papacy,” Robert Kennedy has begun a Diet of Worms

Note: Top 5 months of April for number of #USwx #tornadoes since 2000: 1. April 2011: 758 2. April 2024: 356 3. April 2025: 352 4. April 2019: 272 5. April 2020: 264 #wx #wxsky

Appears there may be two mesocyclones on this supercell in SE Florida, with one over the water east of Boca Raton. One wonders about some stout waterspout potential there.

It feels like people in the last few weeks are just walking around all the Boulder trails and tossing matches everywhere on a daily basis. New fire at Sanitas now.

Elektra, Texas, the state's best town name, on 7 April 2008.

With tornado season here, this post takes on a different meaning for me, so this applies to me as both existential dread of current politics and my annual urge to spontaneously use PTO to visit Kansas.

Some of my worst tornado photos I’ve taken; from a tornado event exactly 20 years ago today in north Central Kansas.

A couple of tornado photos from an Agate, CO supercell way back on August 9, 2004. Will our vegetation on the plains be this green this August? Also, some may call the first tornado a landspout, but it interacted with the developing low-level meso, blurring the lines of simple classification.

April 4, 1957 – New Scientist runs story on carbon dioxide build-up allouryesterdays.info/2023/04/03/a...

This is getting a lot of attention in my feed, and I'm very glad it is, as it inspired me to read it. This is a very timely, critical analysis of the adoption of LLMs into science.

Here’s a wall cloud that formed on the storm I was following. Followed it from just outside Ottumwa Iowa almost to Kalona Iowa. The wall cloud produced a confirmed tornado near Kalona and Riverside. #severeweather #storms #storm #iawx

🌎 Explore, Learn, Connect - RAL/MMM Joint Seminar 🌎 ☁️ A Survey of North American Polar–Subtropical Jet Superposition Events: Development, Impacts, & Future Changes ☁️ Andrew Winters, Asst Professor, ATOC CU Boulder ☁️ WED, April 15, 2026 | 1-2 PM (MT) | Free Hybrid Event ral.ucar.edu/events/2026/...

That's quite the storm helicity track for a warm frontal storm tomorrow afternoon/evening in the latest MPAS (a WRF CAM from 12Z shows a similar solution). The shear isn't **all** that different from today, but the instability might be better. Both today and tomorrow have obvious fail modes.

By weird coincidence, I had chased with some fellow CSU grad students on this exact date in W OK in a 15% hatched tor day (1 Apr '06), and the outcome was similar to today, with shear coming in too late, so we ended up with a photogenic line instead of discrete supercells.

Can these lugubrious showers over the mountains make it to us in severely desiccated Erie as at least a light sprinkle? Stay tuned for this exciting adventure of desertification roulette.

My new cloud photo life goal just dropped.

After a disastrously hot and dry winter/early spring in CO, this is not the 360-h Euro forecast of accumulated precipitation we were hoping for.

Sunrise at the moment.

Today is the 19-year anniversary (3/28/07) of a significant high-plains tornado outbreak. The photos here are from SW Nebraska, showing just one of many storms that featured significant tornadoes, from TX to SD. The RUC hodo is for Grant, NE at 0126 UTC (hodo from chasearchive.com)

Interested in hurricanes? I want to introduce TC-ATLAS: the Tropical Cyclone Analysis Tool for Live and Archived Structure. Explore live or past storms without writing a line of code or downloading a data file, building on the capabilities of TC-RADAR: michaelfischerwx.github.io/TC-ATLAS/ind...

Our viewpoint from Erie of that fire. The Marshall Fire was still very fresh on our minds at this point, so this fire understandably triggered plenty of PTSD in the community.

Last night was cool

Tonight’s sunset in 30 seconds. With Venus. (music by Mark Jenkin)

This is absolutely incredible: the average temperature over the past six months (October-March) will end up at 52.5°F in #Albuquerque. That's 4°F above the previous record warmest. 🤯 Even after accounting for climate change, the odds of it being THAT warm are 1-in-123,000!! 🤯

Caption this.