Milind Sharma

Happy Birthday, Dan!

Oceanographers of the world! There will be an information session for my Life Skills for Young Scientists (LiSYS) mentorship program at OSM 26 in Glasgow, on Thursday, February 26, from 3:45 - 5:15pm.

I will describe the program, and you can meet past participants as well. All are welcome!

I encourage all who are going to AMS this year in Houston to read this excellent AFD from Cameron Batiste at the NWS Houston WFO. Impacts, uncertainties, synoptic setup, etc. Just fantastic: forecast.weather.gov/product.php?... .

🚨 🚀 A crude interface I built to expose an archive of College of DuPage GOES imagery since about 15 Apr 2017. The archive is around ~500TB in size over ~2.5 billion JPEG images. Yikes, but here you go.

mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/archive/cods...

Anyways happy for feedback. Not worth the effort?

Screenshot of the Nullschool app in landscape orientation showing wind streams over the Northern Pacific Ocean with the action menu overlaid on top.

I'm excited to announce the official Nullschool app is here!

earth.nullschool.net on mobile browsers works fine, but the app is nicer. Full screen display, persistence across sessions, text size that matches device settings. Even landscape works well.

And, like the website: no ads!

Links below ⬇️

We conclude that deterministic ACI simulations can be misleading. We recommend using ensembles whenever possible. When computational costs make that impractical, at minimum it is important to sample a large number of convective cells developing under similar environmental conditions.

More importantly, the variability from random perturbations is comparable to the hypothesized invigoration of convective updrafts in heavy aerosol loading (polluted) conditions.

What we found is that small-scale perturbations in the initial state can lead to large variability in key updraft properties, including vertical velocity and supersaturation. Those differences directly affect cloud droplet nucleation and feed back onto the updraft dynamics themselves.

We set out to model ACI in subtropical summertime environments in southeast Texas. Using idealized WRF simulations, we modeled a deep convective cloud initialized with observed thermodynamic and aerosol conditions.

The Importance of an Ensemble Approach for Modeling Aerosol‐Convection Interactions Random initial temperature perturbations can rival aerosol effects on updrafts, risking misattribution in deterministic simulations For TRACER-like environments, at least 10 ensemble members are ...

New Publication Alert: A fun paper that came together almost on the fly when I first started working on numerical modeling of aerosol-convection interactions (ACI) is now out in AGU Geophysical Research Letters.

Check out the full paper here: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Graphic for the 106th AMS Annual Meeting featuring headshots and names of two moderators and four panelists including Dr. Liz Mulvihill and Dr. Shree Mishra as moderators, Dr. Jean-Francois Lamarque from Three Carins Group, Dr. Valiappa Lakshmanan from Stealth AI Startup, Dr. Kristen Averyt from AGU, and Kari Bowen from CIRES as panelists. The session titled 'The Great Pivot: Career Reinvention in a Changing World' is scheduled for Monday, 26 January 2026 from 10:45 AM - 12:00 PM CT.

Join our #AMS2026 presidential session featuring public, private, and nonprofit professionals across all career levels in weather and climate.

Hear insights from their career journeys across sectors, including challenges and opportunities along the way.

Learn more: https://bit.ly/4aEGkN8

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵

Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Awesome turnout in support of @ncar-ucar.bsky.social at #AGU25. Take a look at how many people use our products!

I have noticed a similar pattern in other AMS journals like BAMS. Not sure why.

Incredible footage of volcanic eruption of a dormant volcano in Ethiopia from a commercial plane.

A sight seen for the first time in recorded history. ⌚

From Warren Buffett's farewell letter:

Have you heard? The Geoscience Data Exchange platform is running and ready for community use! Designed to accelerate discovery and collaboration, GDEX ensures that scientific data are accessible and preserved for the research community, increasing discoverability and enabling collaboration.

Oh, I joined late and missed Bob's talk. Will go back and check that. Thanks!

Great presentation & QnA session, Russ! Your discussion on CONUS404 vs WoFS for the TN extreme precip case, as shown in Burke et al. 2024, makes me wonder how much role does topography play in cloudburst events in the northwestern Himalayan region over India. Could as well be event dependent?

Unidata had issued a public notice regarding the change in bucket name in August 2025:
www.unidata.ucar.edu/blogs/news/e...

TIL: There's another field of study, besides Metrology, that’s spelled almost like 'Meteorology.'

YouTube video by UW-AOS UW Madison Hurricane Melissa - 1 minute visible imagery from 18 UTC Oct 24, 2025 through 15 UTC Oct 29, 2025

Here's a loop of the 1-minute mesoscale visible imagery of Hurricane Melissa from roughly 18 UTC Oct 24 through 15 UTC Oct 29. These are not remapped, so the image jumps when the meso sector moves, usually around 18 UTC each day.

youtube.com/shorts/fIuAD...

Calling all ensemble forecast system enthusiasts! The State of Texas is funding development of a new ensemble prediction system (100 members, 2km grid spacing) with an embedded WoFS interface, to be developed at Texas Tech! Passing along 3 open research scientist positions towards that development:

Absolutely true!

Did you know that @ametsoc.org offers a Substack channel!? Called "Weather with a Twist", it offers short, free, whimsical dispatches about the latest research in meteorology, courtesy of the AMS's education team. #WaterWednesday

🔗https://weathertwist.substack.com/

Weather radar people: I’m on the steering committee for a Radar Technology Community Workshop to be held at NCAR in early 2026. We’re trying to nail down dates and topics to attract a good cross section. Please fill out this 5-minute survey and share the link! www.eol.ucar.edu/Radar-Techno...

Screenshot of the lesson, showing a radar dish overlaid with text: "Online Course Dual-Polarization Fundamentals 1h 30m - 2h Description Once an experimental type of weather radar, dual-polarized (“dual-pol”) weather radar is now deployed across the United States and many parts of the world. This lesson will introduce the basic principles of dual-pol weather radar. By the end of this lesson, learners will understand physical meanings of several commonly used polarimetric radar variables, including differential reflectivity, correlation coefficient, differential phase, specific differential phase, and linear depolarization ratio. Examples will be presented demonstrating the distinctive polarimetric signatures of different scatterer types, both meteorological and non-meteorological. Note: This lesson has as a prerequisite the prior lesson, Weather Radar Fundamentals. It is strongly recommended that beginning learners complete that lesson before starting this one."

I am so excited to announce that one of the radar meteorology courses that I developed with @comet-meted.bsky.social is now available! "Dual-Polarization Fundamentals" picks up where "Weather Radar Fundamentals" left off! learn.meted.ucar.edu#/online-cour... (Register on learn.meted.ucar.edu first.)

Moisture convergence:

Here is the perfect alignment of the surface front along the state border. Source: NOAA NWS SPC Mesoanalysis