Rainbow in Ramblewood this evening

For the second time in under a year, I saw a supercell and the aurora within the same day. October 6th, 2024 (left) and May 16th, 2025 (right)

The beauty of central Pennsylvania's ridges and valleys

Photos from my walk today at Lake Perez

Strange to only mention climate in the headline, but this would also effectively kill R&D at NOAA. Do you enjoy America’s status as a top player in numerical weather prediction that provides its world-class data for free? Under this proposal, we would fall behind the world in a matter of months.

How to identify streamwise vorticity on a hodograph, in 60 seconds

The hodograph parameter critical angle is meant to quantify how streamwise low-level shear is, but it can be misleading due to its non-linear relationship with streamwise %. You don't have to be particularly close to 90° to still have almost entirely streamwise shear.

For me at least, energetics is the most intuitive approach to understanding cold pool dynamics. I've done a writeup about it here:

Despite being an essential part of a severe weather forecaster’s toolkit, hodographs have a notorious learning curve. So, I have put together this 3D animation as a visual aid to help those new to hodographs understand what they’re showing.

Aurora tonight in central PA!

Went to Black Moshannon State Park last night to try out star trail photography for the first time

Lunar eclipse in Boiling Springs last night. For these celestial events, I always try to focus on a unique, zoomed out composition rather than the telephoto shots you see from everyone else.

Moonset tonight

Sunset in Dillsburg tonight

State College sunset yesterday

First central PA aurora of 2025 tonight! Negative bz + low GOES mag does the trick in solar maximum apparently

Wind and rain in State College this afternoon

I see waaaaaaaay too many people trying to use LLMs as if it was an internet search engines and treating output as genuine fact. It's not a database search, it's a model trained primarily to generate text that sounds like a realistic response to your prompts.

22° halo in Dillsburg tonight with a nearly full moon and cirrus associated with an approaching winter storm

Tonight’s Moon and Venus conjunction from Central PA

Some of my best astrophotography. Lunar eclipse from a few years ago, aurora from both the May and October major geomagnetic storms last year, and a comet/Milky Way two-for-one shot

Colyer Lake last evening

The Moon and Mars in close proximity tonight

The summit of a snow-covered Mt. Nittany

A tale of two seasons

Snow squall Friday afternoon

Happy New Year, Sandlot style!

Sony A7R II 20 mm | 1600 ISO | f2.8 | 30”

Low-level (~200 m AGL) couplet is tilted at an angle relative to the radial that implies both rotation and convergence. I would surmise that near term tornado risk is thus elevated.

Night and day at Hawn’s Overlook south of Huntingdon, PA

Amazing sunset tonight in Dillsburg, #pawx

Example of this concept in action today with deepening low pressure off the NE coast

Showing mathematically that baroclinic instability of Rossby waves is expected to occur when there is a horizontal temperature gradient and phase lines are tilted upshear.

Extra stream flow from rapid snow melt = big hydraulic jumps

Check out my end of the year photography highlights on instagram! www.instagram.com/p/DDiOC9Nysn...

Completely unacceptable road conditions in State College tonight. Despite just 1” with a little sleet mixed in and a temperature that has yet to drop below 31 F, no pre-treatment of any kind (at least nothing remotely effective) was done. Even main roads like Atherton St have become slip and slides.

To begin today’s storm, snow crystal growth is mostly columnar with aggregates of needles dominating. This indicates large ice supersaturations but in the wrong temperature range for dendrites (for now)

Some gravity waves with a phase velocity of zero earlier. Using that fact, along with the assumption that the phase lines have minimal vertical tilt (I.e. m<<k), the Brunt-Väisälä frequency can be estimated from radar observations of background flow and wavenumber!