OceanStWx

Glad to know you feel that way. The probationary employees that were let go were not the fat in the organization. I know them, I had friends lose their jobs. I frankly find it offensive. That ho hum attitude about it all is definitely what is causing people to continue quitting government service in NOAA/NWS.

I mean what is getting rid of 566 out of ~4000 but dismantling? It's been a miserable stretch since February, and I haven't even had it as bad as some other offices. Thankfully tremendous public support and pressure from Congress has granted us that public safety exemption and the ability to hire back 450 positions. However that is going to come with pretty radical changes to the structure of the NWS as well. What those will be is above my pay grade, but there is more coming (not all bad necessarily). My general feel for this is that NWS knew budgets weren't ever going to get appreciably bigger. They created a plan to reorganize the operations model. The election happened and DOGE came in with a sledgehammer and forced the NWS to pause reorganization because they lacked the staff to do it the way they had planned. Now based on briefing the right people we have the okay to move forward with reorganization as long as we can get staffing back up. I don't have hard evidence of that, but I have enough pieces of information to put that together.

I mean the winter Canadian air masses aren't even that great anymore.

Probably for the reason Brian mentioned. Let the natural forest burn now to make it more fire resilient in the future.

I think the count this morning was like 507 out of control fires and they are attacking (one way or another) 208 of them. The rest I'm not sure there is any way to reach them without a skimmer.

I do think part of the problem with this year is some of these fires never went out from last year. Like they smoldered in some peat bog overwinter and then erupted this spring again. Also they recently traced a fire start back to an osprey that dropped a fish on a wire that sparked. So it's really easy to start a fire when it's dry. Hell I've even done some dumb shit trying to take care of brush in my fire pit.

I haven't seen any good study on it, but we were wondering if there has been upticks in lightning activity in the boreal zone of Canada. The clustering seems awfully close together to be firebugs intentionally starting them, but more akin to a bunch of lightning starts. Similar to what happened in Big Sur back a few years ago. But we know there have been bad seasons up there in the past. There are reports of ash up to thy knickers. Or at least the sun blotted out by smoke in the old weather records.

It was added in support of the ICECHIP field research project.

Hourly max hail swath at the surface, hourly max through the entire atmosphere, and hourly max at the 0.1 sigma level.

Marginal risk and we're taking bets on whether we'll see lightning in the CWA today (I'm still betting yes ).

EWR gusting to 55 kt

Nice downburst near Raynham.

The FV3 core is poor with convection, so they are moving to the MPAS core, but that's going to take some time testing too. It's not strictly a convective model, it's supposed to be short term (60 hr) hi-res guidance to replace the NAM and HRRR at the same time. So it has to handle synoptics well too.

Well you're in luck. Of course the RRFS is worse with convection.

Oh I would be skeptical. I don't think SPC will ever do it now that we have the added enhanced risk level, they can always just throw a moderate up and that would be a big enough deal.