Saturday: The item below is from Twitter/X and was published by Dr. Ryan Maue who is a meteorologist and the former chief scientist of NOAA. I share his concern. As I mention below, I would be putting proactive water conservation measures in effect now, just in case.  -- The information below was published Thursday --  We try very hard to make this a "no hype" site for weather forecasts and other information. With that said, my concern is growing by the day that we are in for serious and worsening drought in the western half of the "Lower 48." The map above is the difference from average forecast temperature for the next five days. From California to the Rockies and High Plains it is forecast to be very warm. This is an "ensemble" of forecasts from the ECMWF model system (which tends to dampen out forecast extremes as we get farther into the future) and it continues to show significantly warmer than average weather in the same area. With greater heat, high...

Climate Central, a Big Climate advocacy organization, has released its version of the discredited NOAA "Billion Dollar Disasters" product. It purports to catalog disasters that have caused a billion or more of disasters. Except it doesn't. Their map is below.  Look closely at these "disasters." All but three are multi-day and multi-region mashups of different types of storms to create "disasters." I have added arrows to several items in the West to help illustrate my point. To compare: The Joplin Tornado was a billion dollar disaster. Hurricane Helene was a billion dollar disaster. "North Central & Central Severe Storms" over a six day  period aren't even close. In their fine print, Climate Central acknowledges that some of the rising cost are due to "socioeconomic" trends (example: expensive mansions built in the path of Florida hurricanes).  Plus, all of these are weather , not climate, disasters. This especially true of ...

We'd like to wish you a happy and healthy 2026!! How would you like some amazingly good news? With statistics from both Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. and Dr. Ryan Maue, 2025 was likely the lowest number of deaths due to natural disaster events in history! From Roger : I've often commented that the tornado warning system, alone, is a Nobel Prize-worthy achievement . The entire storm/natural hazard (tsunami, etc.) forecast and warning system is one of mankind's greatest achievements. 

Please read Ryan's concise message: Ryan is absolutely correct. As we have said, over and over, NOAA is a mess and, possibly, corrupt. Under Biden, NOAA treated the National Weather Service (NWS) as if it was a bothersome and unimportant brother.  My advice to President Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is that NOAA is not salvageable and that the NWS and weather-related parts of NOAA should be spun into a stand-alone agency. The details of how this would work are here . The additional monies desperately needed by NWS can come by drastically cutting FEMA. Details on my proposal for FEMA are here . Questions? Just post them in the comments. 

NOAA Headquarters in Washington Today, the New York Times  published an op-ed pertaining to the future of NOAA and the NWS. It was written by Dr. Ryan Maue, an extremely smart scientist (PhD in tropical meteorology) who served as Chief Scientist for NOAA during the first Trump Administration. You will find the op-ed here . It is an important read. Excerpts: With the rising costs of and vulnerability to extreme weather in a changing climate for the United States, dismantling or defunding NOAA would be a catastrophic error. Rather, there is a golden opportunity to modernize the agency by expanding its capacity for research and innovation. This would not only help Americans better prepare for and survive extreme weather but also keep NOAA from falling further behind similar agencies in Europe. While the incoming administration may want to take a sledgehammer to the federal government, there is broad, bipartisan support for NOAA in Congress. It is the job of the incoming Republican-con...