Articles

Last week marked a significant disruption in America's weather monitoring infrastructure as four U.S. regional climate centers abruptly ceased operations due to a lapse in federal funding. This regional climate center shutdown, which began at midnight on April 17,...

In an era of increasingly extreme weather events, the National Weather Service (NWS) stands as America's first line of defense against nature's fury. But today, this crucial institution faces a critical challenge threatening its ability to fulfill its 150-year mission...

Weather forecasting is a precision science, with computer models relying on a delicate ecosystem of atmospheric data. At the core of these sophisticated prediction systems are weather balloons – critical instruments that provide the nuanced, three-dimensional...

I'm an outsider in most of the fields I've worked in. Long ago, my first job out of college was building terrain database software for military training, but I wasn't a tank commander. Later, I got into flight simulation, but I'm not a pilot. Currently, I work in tech...

The other day, I participated in a discussion on open-source adoption and was surprised by some opinions. One really stood out: Some technologists think their companies are still deciding on open source. This is an argument from the early 2000s, perhaps even the late...

I live in Northern California, and we were largely spared by wildfires this year. Southern California was obviously not, and Canada and the East Coast of the U.S. got hit pretty hard last year. Effective wildfire smoke tracking has become a significant area of...