David A. Lee

Returning to the NYS Assembly chambers in the state capitol for the first time since leaving government, where it all began for me nearly six years ago to the day. Van Buren says hello.

An exciting team, and one that I hope will work with the many enthusiastic climate scientists we have in NYC who are itching to strengthen our city’s weather intelligence and natural disaster predictive models.

The future is collaboration between policymakers and scientists!

As the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season ends, the future of forecasting is AI Meteorologists are surprised that the weather model that did the best job forecasting hurricanes this year was a new one, introduced by Google. AI may be the beginning of a new era of forecasting.

Meteorologists are surprised that the weather model that did the best job forecasting hurricanes this year was a new one, introduced by Google. AI may be the beginning of a new era of forecasting. n.pr/49MFa1M

Was happy to chat with NPR’s Greg Allen for this story. Not mentioned here but importantly, Google’s DeepMind AI model performed well not only this year, but similarly well in retrospective tests from previous seasons. It’s a really exciting step forward.

At long last, a biography on former UN Secretary General U Thant — by his grandson no less — is published. Looking forward to reading.

Community highlights ✨

- @marekhonzal.com on immutability patterns in TS
- @davidalee.bsky.social on flash floods and TypeScript
- @mastrojs.bsky.social showcases the simplest web framework
- Marc Dahmen created a sorted-tree UI library in vanilla TS

We can all agree New York will have come a long way in our mayors and their Spanish-speaking ability.

Alphabet Agency | David A. Lee | Substack Building the future by bringing science and social governance together. Click to read Alphabet Agency, by David A. Lee, a Substack publication. Launched 10 months ago.

In the coming days and weeks, I’ll be building a suite of data tools, alongside my writing on Alphabet Agency, to help prepare policymakers and the new administration confront the extreme weather crisis.

alphabetagency.substack.com

Why do I overlay the elections data? To impress on everyone the fact that Mamdani, Cuomo, and Sliwa voters alike are beset by extreme weather crises, and that it is incumbent on our new mayor @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social to prioritize weather intelligence and infrastructural resiliency for all NY'ers

one in Hollis, Queens, at the cross-intersection of 204th St and 100th Ave,

and the second in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, at Kingston Ave and Rutland Rd.

Lastly, I animated my map to cover the late evening of the 30th into the early morning of the 31st. Over this period, the maximum water depth recorded was in excess of 23 inches, from two sensors:

Red columns, and their heights, indicate relative water depth at that sensor location.

I built a pipeline for the FloodNet data — which has a fantastic, quickly responsive team — and unofficial mayoral election data from the NYC Board of Elections.

Blue and white areas denote a greater and lower percentage of Mamdani voters, respectively.

Large-scale WebGL-powered Geospatial Data Visualization Tool Kepler.gl is a powerful web-based geospatial data analysis tool. Built on a high performance rendering engine and designed for large-scale data sets.

To observe where flooding was most severe, I learned kepler.gl, an open-source TypeScript library for GPU-rendering of geospatial data.

2 Men Die in Basement Flooding as Sudden Downpour Hits New York Area

Last Thursday, October 30th, NYC experienced one such event, in which two of our fellow New Yorkers tragically died.

(Source: @nytimes.com: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/n...)

Yesterday, I had the idea to look at FloodNet, a joint collaboration between the New York City government, NYU, and CUNY to collect real-time flood sensor data and quickly detect urban flash flooding situations.

NYC’s next mayor Zohran Mamdani has a big climate policy to-do list The mayor-elect did not talk a lot about climate change on the campaign trail. But the city has major electrification plans that he can help accelerate.

Mamdani "inherits a world-leading experiment in retrofitting buildings to slash emissions, open questions about how to transition to cleaner power sources, and a patchwork of adaptation efforts," writes @alexckaufman.bsky.social: www.canarymedia.com/articles/pol... 🔌💡

Especially to friends in climate science, hydrology, and civil and energy engineering who specialize in extreme weather disaster mitigation: the new administration will be best served with you!

If you have scientific, engineering, or tech expertise, please apply.

There is never a shortage of need for top talent in understanding how the physical world and our infrastructure is built.

It is somewhat poetic that Dick Cheney dies on the day Zohran Mamdani will be elected mayor.

Throwback to the pumpkin I carved for the @aoc.bsky.social 2018 campaign during spooky season that year. Astonishing to witness how much New York’s political landscape has metamorphosed since.

As governor, Andrew Cuomo shut down Indian Point, a three-unit nuclear power plant in Peekskill, NY.

Consequently, median electricity prices in the state nearly doubled from $24.70 / MWh to $45.39 / MWh in 2023.

Do not vote for Cuomo.

freopp.org/whitepapers/...

Some of these folks would go onto become key figures in Zohran Mamdani’s astounding victory this year. It still is beyond surreal for me to witness former colleagues ascend to the apex of municipal power in New York.

The minutiae of legislating are those the public never sees: how to navigate the Intranet, edit and file a legislative bill draft (LBD), navigate the Consolidated Laws, and where to go to claim a government employee discount at the Downtown Albany Holiday Inn.

Looking back at old materials I created during my tenure at the New York State legislature, with the purpose of training the incoming chiefs of staff and legislative directors of the democratic socialist lawmakers elected in 2020 — including Zohran Mamdani’s staff.

cc: @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social

New York City is Too Hot (in a bad way): Thoughts for Mayor Mamdani on a Heat-Resilient City, Part I The summer that brought us Taylor Swift’s engagement, Zohran Mamdani, and triple-digit temperatures is over. What’s next?

Please read and share widely!

alphabetagency.substack.com/p/new-york-c...

☀️ Although NYCEM has had a surge of hiring in recent years, most of these hires are driven by the City's delegating the response to the influx of asylum seekers to the city to NYCEM. Deliberate efforts must be made to increase the City's governmental capacity to address extreme weather hazards.

City and State policymakers should be prepared to account for funding cuts *when* they come. Disaster relief functions cannot be at the mercy of oscillating and turbulent politics.

Some insights I found:

💵 The contours of funding for NYCEM are enormously driven by grantmaking from the federal Department of Homeland Security.