Nick Lutsko

More extreme Indian monsoon rainfall in El Niño summers Extreme rainfall during the Indian summer monsoon can be destructive and deadly to the world’s third-largest economy and most populous country. Although El Niño events in the equatorial Pacific are kn...

... and suppresses ordinary convection, but when storms do break, they’re stronger. This is similar to a dynamic we expect to see in a lot of places in a warmer world: fewer moderate rains, more violent extremes.

Link: www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

Interesting new @science.org paper by Spencer Hill et al shows that El Nino events weaken India's average monsoon rainfall, but *intensify* extreme precip.

They also give a neat mechanism: subsidence during El Niño dries the mid-troposphere over India...

Prospect of life on Saturn’s moons rises after discovery of organic substances Scientists studying water vapour plume from Enceladus find presence of complex molecules that could harbour life

Scientists reanalyzing Cassini data found evidence that Enceladus’ subsurface ocean contains complex prebiotic molecules. Work like this shows the importance of sustained investment in planetary science missions and of good data management and continuity

www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

The Possible Futures of Climate Modeling — Scripps Climate Physics Like most areas of science, progress in climate science is mainly driven by new capabilities. More powerful computers give us access to new classes of simulations, and new observing systems (satellite...

Link for more: sio-climatephysics.com/notes-1/1hf8...
3/3

Each approach comes with uncertainties about whether it will succeed, and interesting questions about equity and reproducibility. And this debate is happening just as we're starting to have long enough records to identify robust model-obs discrepancies
2/3

I wrote a short piece on the debate about the future of climate modeling: Should we pool resources to do km-scale "masterpiece" runs or focus on using ML to build data-driven models that can still do large ensembles? 1/3

This would leave no indirect costs going to the UC general fund (salaries, tuition support, equipment) or to the Opportunity Fund (faculty recruitment, GSR support, equipment)

Numbers from the 23/24 UC budget request
www.ucop.edu/uc-health/_f...

~2/3 of federal research awards come from the NIH. If the mean OH rate is 50-60%,then capping at 15% would cut total UC overhead cost recovery by about 50%, to ~$500 mill

If other agencies implemented the same OH cap, indirect costs would more or less cover grant administration

Some context on the reduction in NIH overhead rates:

In 2021-22 UC's operating budget was ~$47 billion of which $987 mill came from indirect cost recovery (~2%). 20% of this went to grant and contract administration, ~45% to UC General Fund and ~35% to the UC "Opportunity Fund"

Life-saving weather warnings are on the line as Trump and DOGE target America’s forecasting agency | CNN The National Weather Service, which is suffering its lowest staffing in decades, is staring down further cuts and the nomination of an agency leader they are wary of.

Info based on this report:
amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/02/...

True “efficiency” would come from maximizing what we get out of these obs and developing (and executing) a plan for integrating ML into everything NOAA/NWS does

Hopefully the damage is just 5-10% staff cuts and “searching high and low for DEI”

It’s disappointing this is all a group of tech-minded people can think to do. Now should be an exciting time for thinking about modernizing NOAA: a golden age of earth obs +rapid ML advances in WF

New Record for Annual Increase in Keeling Curve Readings In 2024, the yearly average level of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) rose faster over the prior year than ever before in the 67-year-old Keeling Curve record.

The CO2 data come from
@Scripps_Ocean
Mauna Loa observatory

scripps.ucsd.edu/news/new-rec...

Data from the ML observatory were also used to first show that CO2 increases faster during El Niño years

t.co/QKae46bQCH

2024 was the warmest year on record and it also had the largest recorded increase in atmospheric CO2 (+3.58ppm).

These are related: a strong El Niño drove much of the warming and reduced carbon uptake by drying out Northern Hemisphere land

Observed Impacts of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Wildfire in California Annual burned area in California increased fivefold during 1972–2018, mainly due to summer forest fire Anthropogenic warming very likely increased summer forest fire by drying fuels; this trend is ...

Paper links:
Williams et al (2019)
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...
Guzman-Morales and Gershunov (2019)
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Swain et al (2018)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Simpson et al (2023)
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Finally a caveat is Simpson et al (2023) find observed VP trends in the southwest US are < 0 but models predict >0. Many possible explanations, but suggests studies of future wildfires might underestimate drying. Another example of the importance of resolving model-obs biases

Many studies have found California precip becomes less frequent and more intense under warming (e.g., Swain et al 2018 @weatherwest.bsky.social ). The winter onset also seems to be delayed, though there’s much interannual variability

These are more difficult to tie to climate change – Guzman-Morales and Gershunov (2019) find reductions in the frequency and (to a lesser extent) intensity of Santa Ana winds, though the smallest reductions are in Nov-Dec-Jan

Summer fires (mostly in NoCal forests) are driven by temperature and humidity, so it’s easier to detect a climate signal. Fall fires (mostly SoCal brush fires) are driven by winds and depend on the timing of winter precip onset…

A good paper for learning about connection between California wildfires and climate change is
Williams et al (2019). They look at the historical record, but provide a nice overview of the different types of California fires and their climatic drivers…

Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo In 2023, the global mean temperature soared to almost 1.5 kelvin above the preindustrial level, surpassing the previous record by about 0.17 kelvin. Previous best-guess estimates of known drivers, inc...

...suggestive of shipping regulation changes, but it’s hard to be confident about this with such a short record and with such a simple counterfactual. Multidecadal variability (e.g., AMO, PDO) could also be important, but is hard to account for

Paper:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
(5/5)

This careful analysis of the observations is really useful, but the counterfactual only considers 2020-2024, which is a very short time to identify trends or “emerging feedbacks”. The LCC decline does start in 2020 and seems to be mostly in the tropical Atlantic,
(4/5)

Whether the low cloud cover decline represents a more positive low cloud feedback, a response to aerosols or (non-ENSO) internal variability is an open Q
(3/5)

By comparing with a “counterfactual” model with no albedo changes, they argue the low cloud changes (which they claim are not associated with ENSO) were responsible for the extra 0.2K warming.
(2/5)

There’s a new paper in Science adding to the discussion of the “missing” 0.2K in 2023’s extreme warmth. The authors show that the 2023 featured unusually low planetary albedo, linked to a multi-year trend of declining low clouds, particularly over the North Atlantic and tropical oceans
(1/5)