Wasatch Weather Weenies

There are three provocative public lectures coming up this month at the University of Utah.   Two are this week, are hosted by The Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy, and will be given by Myles Allen, who is visiting from the University of Oxford.  The first explores the role of climate change in extreme weather events.   The second explores what it would take to stop global warming.   Each of these is being given in the L.S. Skaggs Applies Science Building, which is a new building (and my home) just off of University Street.  I don't think it shows up on Google Maps yet, but it is immediately west (and connected to) the Stewart Building (see  https://map.utah.edu/?buildingnumber=18 ). Do not confuse it with the Skaggs Biology Building which is a bit farther to the east.   The third talk is an evening Frontiers of Science lecture being given by Nobel Laureate Martin Chalfie on October 22.  Parking and RSVP information...

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 ...

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 yea...

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...

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 weathe...

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: Access to current and archived weather data, including satellite imagery and forecasts. Support interactive computer capabilities at universities. Communications capabilities between universities, the National Center for Atmospheric Rese...