Ethan Shaw

CORN-ADO CHASING! It was another hot, sunny day with record heat in the Midwest, ripe for dust devils. During the harvest season when cornbelt dust devils fill with corn stalks, I call them corn-adoes! Got my drone into a few of them today.

The impact extreme rainfall events can have in a year - check out Tescott, KS. They'd probably be running near average year-to-date, but a pair of 6"+ rain events Jul 22 and Sep 9 have them running a 10"+ surplus.

Recap your 2025 precip story: ag-wx.com

RE:PUBLIC INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM FOR PUBLIC LANDS.

Something good: a new, nonprofit newsroom run by some wonderful, experienced folks (core crew from Outside mag's glory days) dedicated to journalism about American public lands! Looks like the plan is to collaborate a fair bit with other outlets.

View from a high point across dissected terrain with lots of trees toward amostly flat horizon withe a high summit rising above it just to the right of center of the photo. A two lane road drops down a hill in the foreground, rising to another summit in the middle ground. Another somewhat lower distinct summit is at the right edge of the photo.

West Blue Mound, highest point in southern Wisconsin, on the horizon from a ridgetop in Lafayette County, Wisconsin. East Blue Mound is also visible at the right edge of the photo.

Snowpatch fieldwork up in the "Skyland Block"...

Line graph time series of 2025'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 2024. 2025 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 July and October by looking at the decadal average line positions.

Friday ice update - #Arctic sea ice extent is currently the 10th lowest on record (JAXA data)

• about 50,000 km² above the 2010s mean
• about 1,040,000 km² below the 2000s mean
• about 2,020,000 km² below the 1990s mean
• about 2,760,000 km² below the 1980s mean

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

3:15 PM: Severe-warned thunderstorm just east of Mt. St. Helens, with potential wind gusts up to 60 mph and up to 1" hail! #wawx

Something exciting is coming soon, stay tuned flyer

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Glacier du Pays Bâché (Neouvielle, Pyrénées) ✝️
1896 | 2023

This glacier east of Pic Long (3192 m) disappeared more than 15 years ago! 📈

Was 900 m-long and 30+ ha during the LIA! 🧊💪

Only witnesses: a magnificent moraine and a glacial lake!

Who's next? 🔥

📷1896: Lucien Briet
2023 Mathieu Lavi 🙏

I'm concerned about a potential uptick in fire activity across western Canada in late August and early September - risk has been trending up with dryness over the last week, upcoming week of hot + dry conditions will put pressure on early September rainfall opportunities.

Smoke plume in the distance with mountains and dried sagebrush flats in the foreground.

We saw this plume of smoke from a fire in the Wind River Mtns/Green River Lakes area today. It was reported this afternoon and within just a few hours was estimated at 600 acres. Insane. #wildfire

One lonesome snowpatch still shining in this high-country viewshed...

I'm thrilled to see this paper out, which I co-led with @ditchontologist.bsky.social, and featuring input from loads of excellent co-authors. It's our interdisciplinary perspective on ditches; what they do, why they matter, and how we should look after them.

Cloud-to-ground lightning bolt pierces a scud tag ahead of storms in central Illinois on Saturday night. This was around 10 PM, looking north across the farm fields of Champaign County, IL.

A map of soil color at 125 cm, across the Midwest. There are reddish brown colors around Lake Superior and south and west from there for some distance into Minnesota and Wisconsin. Yellowish-greenish-gray colors predominate in the southwest and there are some bright white to orange colors in part of western Wisconsin, the northern Driftless Area.

Soil color at the scale of the Midwest. Two patterns depending on depth: 1. At 125 cm, it's about parent material. Greenish-gray Des Moines Lobe till to the west/southwest, and reddish-brown sediment of the Superior Lobe and others to the northeast. Sandstone colors in the northern Driftless Area.

Elk Mountain,
8/17/2025, 4:59:35 PM

Anvil crawler heaven here in the stratiform precip region of a thunderstorm cluster southeast of Champaign, IL

One of the most spectacular lightning displays I've seen in my backyard in many years. I felt like I was fumbling my way through shooting most of the show & was just hoping I'd capture one image that conveyed how insane the show felt.

Looking east from Urbana, IL around 12 AM:

Wildfire Fighters, Unmasked in Toxic Smoke, Are Getting Sick and Dying

Every paragraph in this story about smoke exposure is brutal. I'm starting to question how wildland firefighting is any different from Russian soldiers clearing debris at Chernobyl--except it's in much slower motion & we all keep doing things to make it worse. 1/ www.nytimes.com/2025/08/17/u...

A hand drawn map of a dense stream network with many fine branches.

The same stream network as the other image, this time mapped from the National Hydrography Dataset Plus, with only a few larger channels shown as blue lines.

Left: A map of the drainage network of Blockhouse Creek near Platteville, Wisconsin, hand-drawn by my Ph.D. advisor Jim Knox, I believe for his PhD research ca. 1967. Right, drainage network for the same basin, NHDPlus data. Pretty different definitions of "1st order" streams.

Photo of bedforms (ripples of sand), produced by runoff flowing along the edge of a street during a recent storm.

Gutter bedforms

I completely support Rep Garcia's effort here. It is past time that the facts of this matter come to light

Summit: weather-beaten Curl-leaf Mtn-Mahogany & Douglas-fir...distant N-face snowfield beacon across the valley

Box Elder Canyon and Bignell Table, in the loess canyons of western Nebraska, with shadows moving across the landscape as they would on August 9. Uses sun position calculated by {suntools} R package. Visualized with #rayshader. DEM via @opentopography.org

Distant, lone thunderstorm

Lot going on in Nebraska this morning but the gravity waves being pushed southwest of the MCS are as spectacular as I can remember seeing on satellite.

Hunting out final snowpatches in an obscure range, amid crown-of-spikes snags & wolf sign...

Swirly little MCV that almost resembles a tropical system spinning over the border of Montana/Wyoming/the Dakotas this morning.

graph showing day of year against lightning efficiency ( flashes divided by number of fires) https://fireecology.springeropen.com/counter/pdf/10.1186/s42408-025-00376-1.pdf

story from the Williams Lake Tribune on the lightning-caused wildfires in the Cariboo Fire Centre https://www.wltribune.com/local-news/cariboo-fire-centre-receives-1245-lightning-strikes-july-30-8169598

Lightning-caused fire season is in full swing in BC. For central BC we expect about 1 fire per 100 lightning flashes for this time of year (graph below). The Cariboo had over 1200 strikes so would expect about 12 fires -
www.wltribune.com/local-news/c...

The last week of July has been another stormy one with nearly 1,500 reports of severe weather during the period spanning July 23-30, 2025.