“I watched him die… then I watched them maneuver his body like a rag doll— only to discover it was because they wanted to count the bullet wounds and see how many they ‘got’, like he was a deer.”
Dave Matthews and Tim Ryenolds playing Neil Young’s Ohio last night and ends with some Rage Against the Machine.
Alex Pretti, wearing a green sweater with his VA badge on.
This is Alex Pretti.
This morning he was murdered by ICE. Six ICE agents held him down and shot him at point blank range. Alex was a nurse and researcher at the VA.
Our thoughts are with his loved ones and we stand united in action calling for the abolishment of ICE.
#ScientistsAgainstICE
Best of luck, Chris!
If you are going to #AGU2025, come check out the various talks and posters from members of our research group. I hope to see you in New Orleans next week!
Congratulations to two students in our lab, Nishchal and Sugam, for their successful MS theses defenses yesterday! Nishchal's thesis is entitled "American rivers are transporting more sediment in less time." Sugam's thesis is entitled "Why are some watersheds more sediment productive than others?"
Rivers are heating up faster than the air − that’s a problem for aquatic life and people
doi.org/10.64628/AAI...
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
The US Army Corps of Engineers is doing a test run of an underwater dredging method right now in Kansas. This method hasn't been used on a lake before, so it's unclear whether it will work: www.kcur.org/news/2025-09...
On The Climate Brink, I write about the DOE report and our response.
The Department of Energy hired five academics to raise doubts about climate change. 85+ climate experts (organized by @andrewdessler.com) reviewed their report. Our conclusion, detailed in 450 pages of analysis: it is biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policy making.
The worst part about having a paper rejected is not the rejection itself, it's knowing that you'll have to reformat the manuscript for some new online portal submission system.
Can we have a moratorium on using any variant of the word "Advance" at the start of an AGU session title? Nearly 1 in 4 Hydrology sessions begin this way. Alphabetical sorting means these sessions appear at the top - maybe the motivation? An ironic result is that they become harder to differentiate.
This DOE report is best understood through the lens of a well-known saying: “process is product.” In other words, the final document reflects the process that created it — including, most importantly, who was selected to write it. The authors of this report are widely recognized contrarians who don’t represent the mainstream scientific consensus. If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different. The only way to get this report was to pick these authors. The report they produced should be thought of as a law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide. Their goal is not to weigh the evidence fairly but to build the strongest possible case for CO2’s innocence. This is a fundamental departure from the norms of science. A lawyer is expected to represent their client zealously and selectively, presenting only the information that strengthens their case and leaving it to the opposing counsel to present the other side. In fact, a lawyer who stood up in court and gave equal weight to both sides of a case would be considered professionally negligent, possibly even disbarred. In science, the standard is the opposite. Scientists are obligated to engage with the full range of evidence, especially that which might contradict their hypotheses. Ignoring contrary data is not just bad practice, in some cases it can rise to the level of scientific misconduct. Scientific credibility depends on a willingness to base conclusions on all of the evidence. When scientists cherry-pick data or misrepresent the balance of evidence, they are violating a core principle of the discipline. In this report, the authors are firmly in lawyer mode. They sift through data to find the few examples that support their narrative while systematically ignoring the much larger body of evidence that contradicts it. In conclusion, this report does not appear to be a fair assessment of the state of climate science.
I've been getting a lot of requests for comments on the DOE report "A critical review of the impact of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions on the U.S. climate". Here are some initial thoughts. More will come later.
If your journal manuscript gets this group of Pyr reviewers... god help you!
Trump is closing all four climate observatory stations in Alaska, Hawaii, American Samoa, and Antartica. Because you can't have high CO2 levels if you don't *measure* CO2 levels.
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A blue, red, and black graphic reads: "Celebrate Juneteenth."
In observance of #Juneteenth, Virginia Tech offices are closed today.
As we recognize Juneteenth, we also reaffirm our commitment to building a community rooted in our Principles of Community - one that rejects hate, violence, and racism.
➡️ vt.edu/principles-of-community
🚨 New in ES&T! @pubs.acs.org
Ion clusters in an urban stream reveal how salinization varies with hydrology. Storms, baseflow, and snowmelt each leave distinct chemical fingerprints.
A tool for targeting risk & smarter watershed policy: doi.org/10.1021/acs....
@diveredu.bsky.social
I would say that it is worth it to make the most of your remaining eligibility. At a minimum it gets you thinking long-term and building for the future, regardless of how uncertain things are now. Even if not funded, you will get valuable feedback.
Shoutout to my students for fantastic presentations at #HydroML2025. They looked at applying deep learning to do large-scale, high-temporal resolution prediction of hydrograph separation, sediment transport, and freshwater salinization.
Example of how the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite's water surface elevation measurements can be used to record flow wave propagation over space and generate a “spatial hydrograph.”
Hydrologists! Ever heard of a Spatial Hydrograph? Our new paper in @agu.org GRL shows that the SWOT satellite can capture spatial flow waves propagating down rivers—something previously only only observable at river gauges: doi.org/10.1029/2024...
#SWOT #hydrology #RemoteSensing #EarthObservation
Playing in the mud 😀
A Bosnian love ballad called "We will sing what our hearts know" 🇧🇦♥️🎶
Jeffrey Goldberg thinking he was being pranked and then realizing he was actually just in the war plans group chat is such a good microcosm of how it feels to be alive right now, everything seems fake until you realize it’s actually real and incredibly stupid
We expected 2,000 people out in GOP-held Greeley, Colorado.
11,000 people showed up.
Something special is happening, folks. Now is the time to organize in every dimension possible and get to work.
Today, a broad coalition of scientific professional societies who represent over 92,000 scientists are speaking out against the politicization and demonization of Federally funded science and government scientist jobs.
It was an honor to help the Union of Concerned Scientists with this! 🧪🌎
Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦
Variability of flowing stream network length across the US | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Watershed models of flow, sediment, and nutrients are continuously improving. However, the metrics we use to evaluate these models were developed decades ago. In a new paper, we present a set of performance criteria for evaluating models at sub-daily and daily timesteps.
doi.org/10.1016/j.wa...
Watershed models of flow, sediment, and nutrients are continuously improving. However, the metrics we use to evaluate these models were developed decades ago. In a new paper, we present a set of performance criteria for evaluating models at sub-daily and daily timesteps.
doi.org/10.1016/j.wa...
