Last Tuesday, I was set to give a talk on 'climate change in the Northeast' at a retirement home but had to cancel due to hourly job threats.
After nearly two weeks of overwhelming uncertainty, today it happened. I was fired from my dream of working at NOAA. I'm so sorry to everyone also affected.
Statement begins: The mass firing of both new hires and recently promoted senior staff within NOAA, including mission-critical and life-saving roles at the National Weather Service (NWS), is profoundly alarming. It appears that NOAA staff fired today include meteorologists, data and computer scientists responsible for maintaining and upgrading weather predictive models, and technicians responsible for maintaining the nation’s weather instrumentation network (among many others). Housed within NOAA, the U.S. NWS is a truly world-class meteorological predictive service, perhaps singularly so. Its cost of operation is only ~$3-4/yr per taxpayer—equivalent to a single cup of coffee—and yields a truly remarkable return on investment (at least 10 to 1, and perhaps 100 to 1, depending on methods of estimation). NOAA and the NWS collectively offer tens to hundreds of billions of dollars each year in net economic benefit through a combination of averted losses and efficiencies gained....
I have written a short statement responding to mass firings today of #NOAA / National Weather Service (#NWS) staff (which were concentrated among recent hires as well as highly experienced staff who had recently been promoted). Please see below screenshot & below for full text.
I've seen enough. Deleting my X account and sticking to Bluesky for the foreseeable future.
At AGU and interested in how we can improve the reliability of hybrid physics-ML climate models with sampling? Find me at Board 2294 in the Poster Hall tomorrow from 1:30 - 5:30 pm!
Sneak peak of poster below 😉
#AGU24
agu.confex.com/agu/agu24/me...
Attending #AGU? Interested in remote sensing, wildfire, and forests? Come learn more at my talk tomorrow at 10:55am, Room 151A! I go over results on the impacts that wildfire has had on Conifer and Hardwood forests in California from 1985-2022, hope to see you there!
agu.confex.com/agu/agu24/me...
A research team led by Prof. James Randerson studied the historic severity of #wildfires and future implications on forest preservation. They found that #climate change has led to drier forest climates, causing severe fire damage on tree crowns and preventing regrowth. ps.uci.edu/news/3215
Hello! I'm proud to share a new wildfire paper in Environmental Research Letters - California had recent huge fires but tree loss rose much faster, relatively, than burned area. How much is the per-burned-area impact on tree cover losses rising, and why? Paper: doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad86cf 1/7
