Thank You NOAA

Yesterday I submitted a final report for the last grant I received from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which ended on July 31.  This brings to an end 28 years of continuous funding from that agency, so I'd like to give a big thank you to NOAA, the NOAA/National Weather Service, and NOAA Oceanic and Atmospheric Research for supporting the work of my graduate students and collaborators at the University of Utah and beyond.  

If my math is right, I've served as principal investigator (PI or lead scientist) or co-principal investigator (coPI or someone with shared leadership responsibilities) on 15 NOAA grants from 1998–2026.  In 1998, we began to receive annual grants from NOAA for weather support for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, including the installation of weather stations at Olympic Venues and around the Great Salt Lake, the creation of what became MesoWest (led by John Horel), the development of numerical and statistical forecasting systems for northern Utah, and a major field campaign to understand winter storms in the Wasatch Range known as IPEX.  Impacts of this work for regional and Olympic forecasting were described in a series of articles in the February 2002 Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, coinciding with the 2002 Olympics.  

After the Olympics, we received a series of grants over the next 15 years or so from the National Weather Service Collaborative Science Technology and Applied Research (CSTAR) program, which was designed to transfer basic and applied research into operations through collaborative research between academic groups and National Weather Service Forecasters.  This work enabled continued expansion of MesoWest (led by John Horel) but also efforts to advance understanding of the meteorology of the western United States including the Great Salt Lake effect and atmospheric rivers.  

One key advancement during this period was improved understanding of the inland penetration of atmospheric rivers over the western United States.  This work was led by one of my graduate students, Jon Rutz, who also served as an intern at the National Weather Service while in graduate school.  His paper, Climatological Characteristics of Atmospheric Rivers and Their Inland Penetration over the western United States, published in 2014, has been cited more than 700 times and amongst other things illustrated key pathways for atmospheric river penetration into the western US interior.  It also illustrated the more "fickle" relationship between atmospheric rivers and precipitation over the interior compared to the coastal ranges, Cascade Mountains, and Sierra Nevada upstream.  This work is important not only for weather prediction, but also for understanding and projecting future changes in climate and snow hydrology over western mountain ranges.  

About ten years ago, as the CSTAR program was reaching an end, Justin Minder at SUNY Albany contacted me about a new opportunity at NOAA for winter weather funding.  This led to three more grants, the most recent ending on July 31, exploring ways to improve snowfall prediction not only over the western US, but across the continental United States.  This was a dream project for me.  Our most recent publication based on this work explores the use of machine learning to improve snow-to-liquid ratio prediction.

Readers of this blog have benefited from this work as many of the forecast techniques we've developed have been tested and evaluated on https://weather.utah.edu/.  The Utah Snow Ensemble, for example, could not have been developed without the capabilities developed with this NOAA funding.  We are working on upgrades to weather.utah.edu that will more prominently feature the many snow guidance products that we've developed over the years.  Below is a preview of what the new site will look like.

Our most recent proposal to NOAA to continue our work was recommended for funding but was ultimately unfunded due to cuts during the DOGE operations.  While disappointing, I've had an unusually productive run of NOAA funding and am grateful for 28 years of solid support.  I am also grateful for talented students and collaborators who have worked with us on these projects and made the journey fun and exciting.  All of my graduate students have benefited from NOAA funding and are now contributing to the success and growth of the weather enterprise.  Thanks again NOAA.  

Glacial Past of the Alps

Our time in Innsbruck is winding down and we are taking a couple of short trips in the Alps before returning to Utah.  We are currently in the Hohe Tauern National Park, an area of Austria I've never visited before.  We arrived today and spent some time visiting the very touristy but also very beautiful Krimml Waterfalls. 

There was a information exhibit at the base of the waterfalls (collectively they drop over 1200 vertical feet) that examined water in all it's forms, including ice and glaciers.  At it, I learned of some remarkable modeling work by Julien Seguinot and coauthors simulating the glacial history of the Alps over the last 120,000 years.  The video is simply mind boggling.  

It's difficult to comprehend a past in which the Alps were essentially entirely ice covered and glaciers were extending into the Alpine Foreland to the north and south of this remarkable mountain chain.  Below is a the simulated reconstruction for about 30,000 years ago showing such a situation.  The color fill is the simulated glacier surface velocity, so those glaciers issuing into the lowlands at the flanks of the Alps were moving fast and quite dynamic.  

All I can say is science is cool, especially cryospheric science (the study of the frozen water part of the Earth system)!  

Temporary Halt of the Dismantling of NCAR

The National Center for Atmospheric Research Mesa Lab.  Source: Aaron Seltzer/Getty Images.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration moved to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). One component of that dismantling was temporarily halted earlier this week by a Federal judge in Colorado.    

NCAR is run by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which was founded in 1959 and is a non-profit consortium involving more than 100 institutions of higher education.  In February, the National Science Foundation (under the direction of the Trump Administration) informed UCAR that it would transfer management and operations of the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputer Center (NWSC) to a third-party operator.  UCAR's lawsuit argued this was a violation of federal law.  The temporary halt was imposed by after the Federal judge in Colorado decided that the transfer was arbitrary and capricious. More information is available at https://eos.org/research-and-developments/judge-blocks-nsf-from-dismantling. 

This is, however, a temporary reprieve and efforts to dismantle NCAR by the Trump administration will continue.  Real damage is being done to atmospheric science (and American science in general) by these and other actions by the Trump administration. 

NCAR is undoubtably the leading center for atmospheric research in the world.  Other major centers, like the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), Met Office Hadley Center, or Max Plank Institute for Meteorology have more focused missions and lack the breadth of NCAR.  NCAR also has strong ties to universities and provides important collaboration, education, and training opportunities for University faculty and students.  

NCAR has been an important thread through my entire career.  As a graduate student, I began to work with an atmospheric modeling system that was jointly developed by NCAR and Penn State University.  This modeling system, known as MM4, eventually became the MM5, which was ultimately replaced by what we know today as the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF).  In the early 1990s, there were only a handful of MM4 users, but by 2021 there were almost 60,000 registered users of WRF.  It is used for operational forecasting (e.g., the HRRR is based on WRF), simulations of historical events to enable diagnostic calculations or sensitivity studies not possible with observations alone, and regional climate simulations.  Many private sector companies use WRF.  

I have also been involved in field campaigns that have used NCAR's observing systems and field program support services.  The observing systems include heavily heavily instrumented Gulfstream G-V and C-130 aircraft, a polarimetric radar facility, and a variety of surface-based atmospheric sounding and profiling systems.  NCAR is vitally important for field campaign management, which can be highly complex involving in some cases hundreds of scientists and students spanning institutions not just in the United States but often in many countries (and field campaigns are often international in nature and NCAR serves a critical role here as well).  

I don't know how we got to a place where we are talking about dismantling a critical facility for the future of the Nation and humanity, but here we are.  Given the impacts of weather-related disasters in the US, we should be investing in NCAR rather than tearing it down.  Building weather and climate resiliency requires advanced knowledge and cutting-edge modeling tools.  NCAR is a wise investment for a country that experiences the greatest diversity of high-impact weather in the world and a planet that is in the early stages of abrupt and rapid climate change.  

Save NCAR

I'm currently in Alaska and was planning on ignoring the blog for a few days, but I felt the need to address the news released yesterday that the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) would be dismantled.   

At this point we know little except that NCAR is under threat based on a social media post by the Office of Management and Budget director Russel Voight stating that the National Science Foundation will be breaking up NCAR, reviewing its activities and "vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location." 

Subsequently, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today the intent to restructure NCAR's activities including "options to transfer stewardship of the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputer to an appropriate operator; divest of or transfer the two NSF aircraft that NCAR manages and operates; and redefine the scope of modeling and forecasting research and operations to concentrate on needs such as seasonal weather prediction, severe storms, and space weather."

In that announcement, the NSF stated that they remain "committed to providing world-class infrastructure for weather modeling, space weather research and forecasting, and other critical functions."  It's pretty clear that is not the case and that they are embarking on a process that will destroy NCAR.  

Since it's inception in 1960, NCAR has been the undisputed #1 center for atmospheric research in the world.  No other center comes close.  It has built the world's most widely used modeling system, the Weather Research and Forecasting model; operates some of the world's most sophisticated observing systems including the NCAR NCAR Gulfstream GV for high-altitude sampling and C-130; and employs many of the most brilliant scientists in the atmospheric sciences.  It also developed the Community Earth System Model (CESM) and the Model for Prediction Acros Scales (MPAS) model, which is likely to be come the backbone for weather modeling in the National Weather Service (and is currently being used by The Weather Company for their forecasting activities).  

Don't be fooled by suggestions that vital activities will be moved to other entities or locations.  Even if that happens, US capabilities in the atmospheric sciences are going to suffer severely.  NCAR has a critical mass of scientists to tackle some of my fields most challenging problems.  Breaking up NCAR is like breaking up the 1927 Yankees.  You can ship off Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, and the rest of Murderers' Row to other teams, but in the end you're left with mediocrity, not greatness.  Thankfully, the 1927 Yankees did not break up and they won the 1928 World Series in four games.  Let's hope that NCAR similarly is kept together. 

NSF Cuts Shutter NSF Unidata

There's an organization you may have never heard of, but if you are a user of weather data and graphics on the web, they have almost certainly contributed to the cyberinfrastructure that made it possible.

Their name is NSF Unidata, or just "Unidata" for short.  

Unidata developed organically in the 1980s when Universities has a pressing need to access weather data in real time, but couldn't.  The Internet at the time was nascent and there was essentially no hardware and software systems capable of delivering, processing, and analyzing weather data.  In 1983, a workshop at the University of Wisconsin involving about 80 US atmospheric sciences programs coined the name "unidata" and recommended that it be developed to provide:

1. Access to current and archived weather data, including satellite imagery and forecasts.
2. Support interactive computer capabilities at universities.
3. Communications capabilities between universities, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and NASA.

These are things that we take for granted today, but would not have happened without Unidata.  Amongst the products they developed are the Local Data Manager (LDM) which acquires and shares data between providers and users like the National Weather Service, NASA, and universities; netCDF (Network Common Data Form) which is a file format for storing self-described, multidimensional scientific data; and metpy which is a collection of python tools for reading and processing weather data.  They have been transformative for the atmospheric and related sciences, with benefits not only for universities, but also the private and academic sectors and across the world.  

I have benefited and been actively involved with Unidata throughout my career, including volunteer service on their Users and Strategic Advisory (formerly Policy) Committees.  Last year I gave a short virtual talk on Unidata's history that provides some examples of the various ways that Unidata has benefited my career and the atmospheric and related sciences as a whole (apologies that the initial part of the talk is cutoff in the video below).

On 30 April, the National Science Foundation (NSF) froze funding for Unidata, with instructions to stop all funded actions until further notice.  Due to this freeze, most staff in the Unidata program center are being furloughed effective today.  The impacts on are fully summarized below.  

This is yet another example of the damage being done to the US scientific enterprise by the Trump Administration.  Unidata is an example of an organization that has widespread support from the University community because it develops and provides essential scientific services for research and education in the atmospheric and related sciences.  The radar feeds that you take for granted today on your smart phone were first developed by the Unidata CRAFT product.  The distribution of model forecasts that you can access today was first developed by the Unidata CONDUIT project.  And a lot of the graphics that you see on the web rely on Unidata MetPy and visualization software.

These disruptions of the scientific enterprise are pure insanity.  The halting of funding to Unidata will stymie scientific advancement, slow educational innovation, and limit classroom experiences.