Eric Bruning

What the National Center for Atmospheric Research means to the atmospheric sciences Born out of a time of great need for the federal government, NCAR plays a role with few analogues.

Great piece out today in Physics Today on historical origins, contemporary relevance, & fundamental irreplaceability of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which remains at imminent risk of dismantling for partisan political reasons.

Code sprints are social so you don’t need to run solo.

I’ll be happy if at least one person gets the reference, but it’s more likely this joke will crash.

A Carbone brand glass jar of marinara cheekily annotated with the number 42

Running a grad student code sprint tonight with a spaghetti meal. We have this sauce for fans of the history of weather radar color maps. @pyart.bsky.social

As the AMS Annual Meeting approaches, don’t forget that TTU Atmospheric Science is hiring for two faculty positions. We’ll be at the meeting and can visit if you have any questions in advance of the application deadline.

Zeynep Tufecki on having the wrong nightmares about generative AI I was writing a blog post where I was going to reference Zeynep Tufecki’s 2025 NeurIPS keynote, and realized there isn’t a solid synopsis online.

Wrote a summary of a great keynote by @zey.bsky.social at NeurIPS, arguing that we’re having the wrong nightmares about AI: not AGI or superhuman benchmarks, but good-enough genAI at scale threatens "load bearing frictions" society relies on to signal effort, authenticity, sincerity, credibility.

Job announcement for Texas Tech University flood monitoring and modeling system

🚨 METEOROLOGICAL JOB ANNOUNCEMENT 🚨

In response to the deadly flooding event that occurred in the Texas Hill Country this past summer, TTU has received $24M from the state legislature to develop and implement a weather measurement and modeling system to serve the state.

Score report from the ESPN app’s Lock Screen feature, showing a TTU victory

Score report from the full ESPN app, showing an Arkansas victory

Second game in a row where the lock screen score is opposite the in-app score. You’ve got a bug, @espn.com!

Do you love to write code or teach others about data-centered Earth Systems Science? Interested in the interplay of science and data? The NSF Unidata Summer Internship program is looking for you! Apply by February 6, 2026 to work with us next summer: buff.ly/5nsLdRu

I continue to be surprised every time this happens to me! Facts show I must grudgingly accept it.

Even if changes were all in summer I still might not see them until mid-semester when I reran a particular bit of code the one time I needed it. Long-term stability is a bigger help than specific timing.

It’s vexing w.r.t. devs wanting to move things forward vs. users’ intermittency.

Adding my own ux reaction/fears here, the challenge in tracking this down is that there are about 20 versions of the underlying library in between, it’s a low-level change affecting a core operation, and, practically, it’s unknown if I need to spend 10 min or a day to figure it out.

Example: this worked in xarray 2023.4.2 with no warnings but in 2025.06.0: “IndexError: arrays used as indices must be of integer (or boolean) type.” No idea what changed.

ix = {'track': [slice(1, 2, None), slice(4, 5, None)], 'cell': [np.int64(1), np.int64(4), np.int64(49),]}
ds = ds[ix]

My re-teach cycle is about 2 yrs., so a bit longer than that would be ideal. Feels like I see some new decision/persnicketiness on that cycle with some regularity. Really breaks flow of lecture prep when you have to switch to debugging coder brain to get the red (warnings) out.

Took advantage of being sick today to make a joke about amplitude and phase shifts to my voice as part of an exam review on the frequency domain. 😎

Thomas Kinkade bad CGI front exterior

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:

Nope!

Texas Tech Geosciences is hiring two open-rank Atmospheric Science faculty positions in Precipitation Hazards, and in Data Science; part of an interdisciplinary, multi-year Atmospheric Hazards Strategic Hire. See the details for the Precipitation and Data Science positions and join us in fall 2026!

I have been wondering what is the driving philosophy of the present political moment. Focus here is placed on a particular philosophy of apocalyptic thinking, not the politics of WWII Germany.

Yeah, that’s more than enough. I think a fair share is 3x the amount of your first and student authored papers each year. I bet you’ve exceeded that?

Good read on an advancement in the fundamental mathematical physics that we use to quantify the atmosphere. Fun to imagine how the result might also apply to improved statistical representations of cloud and precipitation particle interactions.

DOE climate report response form We are collecting names to assemble a writing team to respond to the DOE climate working group report. If you'd like to contribute, enter your info below. At this point, there is no guarantee what we'll do (if anything), but we want to keep our options open by collecting names. If you have any further questions, feel free to email me. We are primarily looking for Ph.D. scientists at universities or government labs in appropriate fields. I realize that this will exclude some qualified people and I apologize, but we felt this was necessary for a variety of reasons.

🚨 If you're interested in working on a coordinated response to the DOE climate report, please enter your info on this google form 🚨

Please RT this so as many people see it as possible.

forms.gle/BL9xUAfRxA...

“If the U.S. is no longer the world’s technoscientific superpower, it will almost certainly suffer for the change. … Science itself, in the global sense, will be fine. The deep human curiosities that drive it do not belong to any nation-state. An American abdication will only hurt America.”

Passed my @ttu.edu Atmospheric Science M.S. defense today!

Excited to continue on to a PhD with my advisor, @deeplycloudy.bsky.social, looking at lightning with phased array radars

Hi All - We are convening a session at AGU this December, please share with your groups and consider submitting to our session! @ltgbug.bsky.social #lightning #AGU2025

Yeah, that’s mostly my experience.

The tip of the pyramid seems linked to language from empirical-statistical modeling where disciplines can’t draw on ~universally agreed, more general, physical-mathematical theory. But we can as meteorologists. Those are our hard, but most compelling, studies.

Infinite Mac Construction Set

This is @persistent.info’s post with some more technical details – and some further twists like using an LLM to a control an old computer!

blog.persistent.info/2025/07/infi...

Frame of preference A story of early Mac settings told by 10 emulators.

I wrote something new! It’s a UI design history essay about Mac’s Control Panel, and it uses emulation in some… maybe new and maybe interesting ways?

aresluna.org/frame-of-pre...

Come for the UI history, stay for the fully usable and complete app and game nostalgia. Really remarkable.

Frame of preference A story of early Mac settings told by 10 emulators.

From Marcin Wichary, a history of Mac settings (1984-2004). The article includes several embedded emulators, so you can actually use the setting panels under discussion. Amazing. [aresluna.org]