Map of U.S., from coolwx.com, showing locations currently experiencing record-breaking temperatures. There are many such locations in the Western U.S., with numerous red dots (locations breaking daily record highs) and even quite a few pink dots (locations breaking March monthly record highs).

Well, the ridiculous mid-March heat has officially arrived in the Western U.S., with quite a few locations in California already reaching/breaking all-time monthly records today. Believe it or not, the heat will further intensify and become even more widespread later this week.

Map of western and central North America showing the earliest calendar date (Mar 17 to Jun 16) when historical 500 hPa heights met or exceeded the current 10-day forecast peak at each grid point. Gray areas indicate locations where that threshold was already met by today. Earliest dates (purple/blue, late March to mid-April) cluster in parts of the Southwest and southern Plains, while later dates (orange/yellow, May to mid-June) appear across much of California, Nevada, Utah, and nearby interior regions.”

The upcoming SW USA heat dome is predicted to be so anomalous that the 500 hPa heights over the entire region will exceed every historical daily max (1990-2025) from now until JUNE.

This may be a short lived event, but the consequences for snowpack, water supply, and drought will be felt all year.

What Americans Lose If Their National Center for Atmospheric Research Is Dismantled - Eos Five ways dismantling NCAR will cost the American people, and two ways to save it.

NCAR represents what is possible when a nation chooses to invest in science as a public good, writes @carlonimbus.bsky.social of @ucs.org. #SaveNCAR eos.org/opinions/wha...

Attention folks in the weather, climate, disaster, wildfire, and Earth science communities: NSF has just published a new "Dear Colleague" letter inviting feedback (by Mar 13) on the proposal to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). www.nsf.gov/funding/...

Before the 1990s, plane crashes caused by microbursts used to kill planeloads of people fairly regularly.

Dr. Ted Fujita and NCAR scientists figured out how to detect microbursts and warn pilots about them.

Since then? Zero airliner crashes from microbursts.

Collatz, Berry, Clark, Sellers and colleagues practicing open data policies since the mid 90s :-)

Just published this new paper, with a bunch of fantastic colleagues, with many suggestions for "Improving the representation of plant water stress and water use in Earth System Models." Access is free online. We have some great figures, thanks to Victor Leshyk. 🧪🌐🌳🌎

This is a great opportunity for US based early career scientists to build international research collaborations. Please spread the word.

Cryptic CAM photosynthesis in Joshua tree (Yucca brevifolia, Y. jaegeriana) Joshua trees are long-lived perennial monocots native to the Mojave Desert in North America. Composed of two species, Yucca brevifolia and Y. jaegeriana (Asparagaceae), Joshua trees are imperiled by...

Our "Joshua tree is CAM" paper is finally out: nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Data collection started back in 2021, when we saw weird results in some RNAseq that made me stop and wonder if Joshua trees, long thought to be C3, were actually...CAM!

AGU Biogeosciences DEI Travel Grant 2025 This is the application for the 2025 AGU Biogeosciences DEI Travel Grant. Please submit by September 10th to be considered for the award. More information can be found here: https://connect.agu.org/bi...

Applications for Fall Meeting AGU-B DEI Travel Grant for up tp $1500 (with a minimum award amount of the cost of graduate student early bird registration) ARE OPEN and close September 10th! Apply here. (docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...)

Sure. This works when you know you are dealing with the ASCII character set, but it isn't guaranteed to work for German umlauts (depending on the Python version).

str.lower() method is your friend

Seriously, in 2025? Submitting an abstract is not waiting in line for a restaurant. I can't believe our membership fees couldn't afford a modest AWS plan to deal with queuing and concurrency

Will anyone review this paper? Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review Scholarly publishing relies on peer review to identify the best science. Yet finding willing and qualified reviewers to evaluate manuscripts has become an increasingly challenging task, possibly even ...

1. Kevin Gross and I just posted a new science-of-science preprint.

This one explores the looming peer review crisis. As many of you know, it's becoming significantly more difficult for journal editors to find scholars willing to serve as peer reviewers for submitted manuscripts.

Reduced water loss rather than increased photosynthesis controls CO2-enhanced water-use efficiency - Nature Ecology & Evolution A machine learning approach using long-term observations of eddy covariance finds that the increase in plant intrinsic water-use efficiency under higher CO2 levels, across diverse ecosystems, is drive...

Interested in how plant intrinsic water-use efficiency (iWUE) responds to rising CO2? Our new paper shows that CO2-enhanced iWUE is mainly driven by reduced canopy conductance, while stimulation of ecosystem photosynthesis is less detectable given current data length. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

NSF Division of Earth Sciences Informational Webinar

US Earth Science people: Our June webinar felt so good, we’re making it a series. Join us next Tuesday 7/15 (and again in Aug & Sept) to hear from NSF staff and to get (most of?) your questions answered. www.nsf.gov/events/nsf-d...

Excerpt from proposed NOAA budget showing zero funding for Climate Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes

Proposed NOAA budget zeros out ALL climate laboratories and cooperative institutions.

GFDL, NSSL, GML, etc.

This appears to also end the US greenhouse gas sampling network, including at Mauna Loa, the oldest continuous carbon dioxide monitoring site on Earth.

www.commerce.gov/sites/defaul...

Termination of OAR’s Climate Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes (-$102,292, -204 FTE/ -216 Positions) –NOAA will continue to support high priority ocean and weather research programs in NOS and NWS. In coordination with the requested terminations for Weather Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes (see OAR-10) and Ocean Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes (see OAR-19), NOAA will close the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) in Miami, FL; the Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) in College Park, MD, Idaho Falls, ID, and Oak Ridge, TN, as well as a nation-wide network of soil moisture sensors; the Chemical Sciences Laboratory (CSL) in Boulder, CO; the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, NJ; the Global Monitoring Laboratory (GML) in Boulder, CO, Utqiaġvik, AK, Mauna Loa, HI, Hilo, HI, Big Island, HI, American Samoa, and the South Pole; the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) in Seattle, WA; and the Physical Sciences Laboratory (PSL) in Boulder, CO.

What a tragedy this is even being proposed on paper... 💔

NOAA FY2026 Congressional Justification: www.noaa.gov/sites/defaul...

U.S. Global Change Research Program | GlobalChange.gov

The US Global Change Research Program a next target of Trump's destruction campaign. My sources report that globalchange.gov will go dark Monday. NOAA is archiving the National Climate Assessment at NCEI.

Permafrost, Peatland, and Cropland Regions Are Key to Reconciling North American Carbon Sink Estimates Additional sink inferred by inversions in just 16% of North America accounts for the discrepancy between top-down and bottom-up estimates Statistically significant differences between top-down an...

Now online: "Permafrost, Peatland, and Cropland Regions Are Key to Reconciling North American Carbon Sink Estimates" by Kelsey Foster et al., including @avnimalh0tra.bsky.social w/ Stanford, PNNL, NAU, and NRC colleagues agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Global variation in vegetation carbon use efficiency inferred from eddy covariance observations - Nature Ecology & Evolution The efficiency with which plants use carbon assimilated through photosynthesis has a key role in determining natureʼs capacity to offset carbon dioxide emissions. This study leverages global eddy cova...

🌍New paper out today!!! Global variation in vegetation carbon use efficiency inferred from eddy covariance observations @xiangzluo.bsky.social @natureportfolio.nature.com 🔗👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Major US climate website likely to be shut down after almost all staff fired Exclusive: Climate.gov, which supports public education on climate science, will soon no longer publish new content

Climate.gov, a major US government website supporting public education on climate science, will likely shut down after almost all of its staff were fired. What would be worse is if the website were co-opted to publish climate denial content.

NSF Division of Earth Sciences Informational Webinar

US Earth Scientists: We know you have questions, come get them answered directly from NSF/EAR POs! Tuesday, June 17, 2p Eastern. Register here: www.nsf.gov/events/nsf-d...

Biogeosciences Early Career Seminar - Recording available.

Don’t worry if you missed the seminar on May 7th – a recording is available on AGU’s YouTube! www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQPG...

DOE ASR program manager just sent a colleague an excerpt from the WH DOE budget that was stealthily dropped: “BER activities in environmental system sciences, atmospheric system research, earth system modeling, data management, and the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement User Facility are terminated."

Graph of carbon dioxide designed as the painting of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" by Katsushika Hokusai.

"The Great Wave" of carbon dioxide (CO₂) #ClimateChange #ScienceArt

Graphic produced by robbieandrew.github.io

Dozens of active and planned NASA spacecraft killed in Trump budget request Proposal would end nearly all new major science missions

Breaking from @science.org: The Trump administration wants to kill off a host of active and healthy NASA climate and planetary spacecraft. It would be a "leaner, more focused" agency, they say -- and one far less capable of studying the Earth and exploring space.

Exciting news! 🎉

We’re thrilled to announce the speakers for our Early Career Seminar happening on May 7th!

Stay tuned—more details coming your way in the days ahead!

Registration 🔗: agu.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Stand Up for NOAA Research – The Time to Act is Now The AMS is a global community committed to advancing weather, water, and climate science and service.

"To envision the disastrous impact of this plan, one only needs to see what NOAA research has provided to the U.S. taxpayer and imagine where we would be without it."

"Now is the time to reach out to your elected representatives."

"Stand Up for NOAA Research" - @nwas.org and @ametsoc.org statement

NOAA just announced a long list of datasets that are going away🧪⚒️🌊: www.nesdis.noaa.gov/about/docume...
Download what you need asap and send comments to: ncei.info@noaa.gov