Daniel Swain
43.6K posts
Daniel Swain
@Weather_West
Weather and climate scientist focused on extreme events like floods, droughts, & wildfires on a warming planet.
Joined November 2013
- I am now hearing from multiple folks in the past two hours (including some who have personally been fired) that mass firings have now commenced within NOAA--including, yes, at the National Weather Service.Unfortunately I can confirm the rumors going around today since I received "the email"...I don't want to make any comments other than I am exploring legal options in a couple of avenues. I will probably be deactivating this account for a variety of reasons soon. I always advocate
- Just kind of obsessing over the amazing and perfectly-framed satellite imagery today of the inbound California storm. This is a *textbook* mid-latitude cyclone, with well-defined warm and cold fronts, and it's even developing an eye-like feature near its center. #CAwx
GIF - I've watched a lot of wildfire-associated pyroconvective events during the satellite era, and I think this might be the singularly most extreme I've ever seen. This is a literal firestorm, producing *thousands* of lightning strikes and almost certainly countless new fires. #BCwxAbsolutely mind-blowing wildfire behavior in British Columbia. Incredible & massive storm-producing pyrocumulonimbus plumes.
GIF 
GIF- Amazing to consider that in past 12 hours the U.S. West has seen devastating (record) flooding in Montana near Yellowstone, extreme wildfire activity in Arizona that visually resembles an erupting volcano amid (record) drought, & post-wildfire debris flows in northern California.
- The U.S. #NationalWeatherService, housed within #NOAA, is a truly world-class meteorological predictive service, perhaps singularly so. It costs only ~$3/yr per taxpayer, & yields ~10:1 return on investment--saving economy 10s-100s of billions, not to mention thousands of lives.Hearing reports that Musk’s cronies are targeting NOAA — infiltrating key systems & locking out career employees. NOAA is vital for weather forecasting, scientific research & more. Their critical work saves lives. My team and I are looking into this & we will not stand for it.
- After becoming increasingly enmeshed in the wildfire world, you start to notice things about the way we've systematically altered our relationship with the natural environment in a way that has increased the risk of destructive fires. And then you stop being able to unsee them.
- There's so much burning right now on the West Coast. Just dreadful satellite imagery.
GIF - One lesson that is going to be learned, yet again, in the aftermath of today's devastating Boulder County, CO fire is just how far into the suburbs the wildfire-urban interface actually extends given sufficiently extreme drought and wind conditions. #COwx #MarshallFire #CAfireApocalyptic views of the #MarshallFire in Louisville, Colorado. Mind boggling what has happened today. #COwx
- We are witnessing a genuinely extraordinary, and regionally quite deadly and destructive, period for extreme #weather in the United States. And, quite frankly, the fingerprints of #ClimateChange are all over what has transpired in recent weeks and may yet occur in coming days.
