Artemis II Return NASA's Orion spacecraft carrying Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialist Christina Koch from NASA, along with Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen from the CSA (Canadian Space Agency), splashes down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego, California, at 5:07 p.m. PDT, (8:07 p.m. EDT) on Friday, April 10, 2026. The Artemis II test flight launched on Wednesday, April 1, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin its 10-day journey around the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars. NASA’s Landing and Recovery team and the U.S. military are coordinating efforts to extract the Artemis II crew from the Orion spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Josh Valcarcel

What a great photo just added on the NASA Johnson Flickr page www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2...

Reconstruction of Jiangchuan biota (~554-539 million years ago). Credit: Xiaodong Wang.

The explosion of forms of morphologies at the beginning of the Phanerozoic is usually listed as having a start date around 535 million years ago. But a new disposit not only pulls that 4 million years further back, it also links it to the Ediacaran fauna. 🧪⚒️

Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Line graph time series of 2026's daily Arctic sea ice extent compared to decadal averages from the 1980s to the 2010s. The decadal averages are shown with different colored lines with purple for the 1980s, blue for the 1990s, green for the 2000s, and white for the 2010s. Thin white lines are also shown for each year from 2000 to 2025. 2026 is shown with a thick gold line. There is a long-term decreasing trend in ice extent for every day of the year shown on this graph between February and April by looking at the decadal average line positions.

Monday ice update - #Arctic sea ice extent is currently the 4th lowest on record (JAXA data)

• about 370,000 km² below the 2010s mean
• about 940,000 km² below the 2000s mean
• about 1,300,000 km² below the 1990s mean
• about 1,790,000 km² below the 1980s mean

More: zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-i...

We’ve got a couple rounds of storms this week, severe weather season is waking up!

Hurricane #Melissa’s Tropical Cyclone Report was published by the NHC today. It was upgraded to 190MPH, tied for fastest Atlantic hurricane speed on record! TikTok video by Kit Thomas - Meteorologist

Today, the Nationa Hurricane Center issued an upgraded max wind for Hurricane Melissa: 190MPH!!!
Here’s a breakdown of some of the findings in their Tropical Cyclone Report.

(I condensed as much as I could to just under 6 minutes)

I’m ready for later sunsets! Spring is just around the corner in Memphis.

This sleet has cemented into glaciers on most roads since we haven’t seen temps much above freezing but three days in the last week. Soon we’ll melt down, but it may take til midweek!

CW: Shooting, murder.

This is an execution in the street by ICE.

I am calling for a complete and total boycott of the Mercator projection in all news stories about Greenland until every member of the American public has seen this

"Heatmap" chart showing the number of hours per day from 1913-2025 that the water level spent above the mean high tide (using the current 1983-2001 epoch) at Key West FL.

This is one of my favorite ways to visualize #SeaLevelRise...

With another year of verified water levels at Key West behind us now (as of today), here's the updated version of this chart I've been making for the past decade or so. 🧪🌊

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It's called climate change denial for a reason.

“The National Science Foundation will be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado," Russ Vought...said in a statement..."This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country."

As James says, this isn't even about climate.

It's about all the tools, platforms, models, datasets we use to study and forecast weather and understand how it impacts people, too.

A look at a successful real-time effort to reduce flooding in western Washington last week Looking at how federal science and water agencies work together in flood events. Also - flood risk continue in the Pacific Northwest while the rest of the country warms up.

Given tonight’s news the admin wants to disband NCAR, resharing my post from earlier today about the successful reduction of flooding on the Skagit R in WA state. NCAR does foundational R&D that enables my community to do the kinds of important work I talk about here. tinyurl.com/bdebat4m

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.

I'm not sure most folks are aware of the immense magnitude of loss this would entail for the global weather and climate community, and beyond. NCAR has played a greater cumulative role in advancing weather prediction and atmospheric modeling than perhaps any other single entity in the world.

NCAR is crucial to cutting-edge meteorology and improvements in weather forecasting. As others have noted, it's far, far bigger than a "climate" research lab. This is self-sabotage by a wildly ignorant and malicious administration cutting off their nose to spite their face. Find a better scapegoat.

Unbelievable. This would be a terrible blow to American science, writ large. It would decimate not only climate research, but also the kind of weather, wildfire, and disaster research that has underpinned half a century of progress in prediction, early warning, and increased resilience.

Oh no... Seeing the direct tweet is even more frightening. Every day is a new crisis, and the repercussions are unimaginable.

NCAR is quite literally our global mothership.

Everyone who works in climate and weather has passed through its doors and benefited from its incredible resources.

Dismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.

Unbelievable.

These people are nuts. NCAR developed the GPS dropsonde, which revolutionized the understanding of TC structure, improved forecasts, and validated remote sensing platforms, as documented in over 400 peer-reviewed publications in the last 25 years. And that’s just one of NCAR’s countless advances.

It will take many years to recover from the damage to essential research structures being frivolously eliminated.
Climate Science is important. It's not just a far-off issue, your insurance is affected by these data, your energy bill is affected by these data, even your future medical bills!!!

Some models are pointing towards a big warm-up for Memphis the days around Christmas! While it's still at the long-range of the models, prone to large error, I wanted to see how likely it was for us to see highs 70+ the week of Christmas.
This is the 30-yr Dec 25 centered average probability.

Check out our new paper about phreatic eruptions at Whakaari volcano in New Zealand! 🌋🇳🇿

Space station flying in front of the moon. Crozet VA. Thanksgiving evening 8:15 pm

Text Shot: "We detected gamma rays with a photon energy of 20 gigaelectronvolts (or 20 billion electronvolts, an extremely large amount of energy) extending in a halolike structure toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The gamma-ray emission component closely matches the shape expected from the dark matter halo," said Totani. The observed energy spectrum, or range of gamma-ray emission intensities, matches the emission predicted from the annihilation of hypothetical WIMPs, with a mass approximately 500 times that of a proton.

🧪 If this observation holds up, I think it’s the first direct signal we’ve detected of a dark matter particle (rather than indirectly inferring their existence from gravitational effects. Exciting!

I wonder if it’s consistent with what we (haven’t) seen at the LHC…

phys.org/news/2025-11-y…

We're not sure what next week will bring... YouTube video by Kit Thomas, Meteorologist

Tonight I dove into the diverging solutions for early next week. Some models bring a cold plunge fast, others delay it to late week and are warmer.
We are certain though that Thanksgiving will remain clear and chilly in the Mid-South, so that's good news!

As a follow-up to yesterday's post about next week's uncertainty:
The Euro Ensemble's weekly temp anomaly is cutting the mid-south down the middle for above/below average temps. The ensembles are so spread it's basically outputting climatology for us.

BREAKING: This is huge news, the EU's equivalent of the 🇺🇸Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling.

🇪🇺Court of Justice just ruled all 🇪🇺countries must recognise same-sex marriages granted in other member states.

This effectively legalises gay marriage across 🇪🇺

History’s “most successful international agreement to date”, the Montreal Protocol, continues to pave the way for complete ozone hole recovery within our lifetimes

Bar graph showing zonal mean surface air temperature anomalies for the period of May-June-July-August-September-October 2025. All latitude bands observed above average temperature anomalies.

All latitude bands were warmer than average over the last 6 months. This was particularly visible across the Arctic and Antarctic regions. 🔥

Plot shows zonal-mean temperature anomalies, where latitude = y-axis (not scaled by distance). GISTEMPv4 data using their 1951-1980 baseline.