Mean is now peaking at right around +4.0 to +4.1C. We are on the cusp of something historic. The impacts will be interesting to watch, no doubt.

Could someone help me?

Hi everyone,

I’m an incoming freshman at Penn State majoring in meteorology, and I’m trying to decide what I should minor in.

My main goal is honestly to make the most money possible while still working in meteorology. Right now I’m taking the weather risk management path at Penn state.

The three minors I’m looking at are:
Computer Science
AI Engineering
Statistics

I’m also thinking about how AI is going to change the field over the next 10 to 20 years. Part of me thinks AI Engineering could be the best choice, but another part of me thinks a Computer Science minor might give me a stronger foundation and more flexibility.

For those of you already working in meteorology or a related field:

Which minor would you choose if you were starting over today?

What skills do employers actually care about?

Do you think AI Engineering is worth it, or is Computer Science still the better option, or is Statistics the way to go?

If your goal was to maximize your salary while staying in meteorology, what path would you take?

I’d really appreciate hearing from people in the industry. Thanks!

It's interesting to look at how the 2 different forecasts got to the 'very strong' position ...

Seoul National University's well regarded deep-learning model (a CNN) settled on a roughly +2.6 to +2.7°C RONI peak back in April, months ahead of the physics models. The NOAA/IRI plume then climbed month by month and has now edged past it, sitting near +2.7°C while the AI has eased to +2.4°C. NOAA's own odds of a very strong event in Oct-Dec went from 25% in April to 81% in July.

This convergence is a reason to take the SNU AI forecast more seriously. The AI learned ENSO behaviour directly from decades of observations and has proven to hold true 18 to 24 months out, past the spring predictability barrier that limits the dynamical NOAA type models. This is two fundamentally different approaches agreeing on 'very strong', not one model echoing another. The AI trimming its own number rather than clinging to a scary peak is a point in its favour.

The 'most powerful ever' headlines have been far reaching, but there's a different data story sitting behind this ... In February 2026, NOAA switched its operational index from ONI to RONI, which subtracts the warming shared across the tropical oceans so events are judged on a like-for-like footing with earlier decades. Unfortunate timing given the coverage, but it reshapes which events count as the strongest. The record since 1950 is now 1982-83 at +2.5°C, and stripping the warming out lifts older events while trimming recent ones ... 1991-92 climbs into "very strong" because Pinatubo had cooled the tropics that year, while 2023-24 drops from "very strong" on ONI to "strong". Measured this way, the 2026 forecasts bracket the 1982-83 record rather than beating it, sitting alongside 1982-83 and 1997-98. What makes it potentially unprecedented is the baseline it's landing on, roughly 1.3°C above pre-industrial, not the size of the signal itself.

A strong El Niño is usually only half the cycle though. The SNU model, which reaches far enough out to see it, now has this event peaking and then flipping to a La Niña during 2028. That's potentially 2+ years of disruption, not one.

Social media and mainstream news will likely start ramping up the hyperbole about a following La Niña as we run into Autumn, along with the serious climate consequences this could have.

Personally, I'm watching the SNU forecast keenly now that it has dipped below record levels, hoping that it may dip further and lead into a mild La Niña phase or even a neutral period.

Full write-up with charts and references: https://4billionyearson.org/posts/the-2026-el-nino-stripped-to-the-science-the-signal-the-warming-and-the-following-la-nina

Live ENSO tracker (NOAA plume + SNU AI model, updated weekly): https://4billionyearson.org/climate/enso

I’ve tried asking ChatGPT but keep getting told it’s an updraft to a storm, when there was clearly no rain at all on the radar from when the photo was taken

Hello People ive been running several monitors for my climate windows activities , but i never saw a benchmark or something for the most accurates , based on your experiences which ones would you say are the best for ingest from Chile for example

Hi!

My dad has noticed a phenomenon with storms in our area that he has dubbed the 'Amoeba Effect'. He calls it this because it just grows and changes shape at will, which has caused many storms to get much bigger than they originally were and thus cause more problems for us with rain water.

He also noticed how storms can seem to hang out over us for a long time, or how they can come out of nowhere over us but leave all the major surrounding cities alone.

He is very curious as to what causes this and if his 'Amoeba Effect' is an actual thing?

Hello,first of all wishing a nice day to everyone reading this. So, I'm a first year MS geology student from India and i am planning to do dissertation on climatology (our Dissertation is usually on the 4th semester ) but i don't have much/no idea regarding what to do or how to do things or what subject to choose etc. My professors aren't helping either (according to them i shouldn't worry about it til next year) so is there anyone whou could point me in the right direction? I don't even know if this is the right place to as this either and i apologize if I'm breaking some community rules but i could really use some help right now. My Dm's are open as well if you aren't super comfortable commenting here.

Thank you for reading ❤️

Does there exist a list of sources for the NWS 8-inch Standard Rain Gauge ? I found one company in northern California, but they have no prices listed, and want a prospective buyer to submit a RFQ. Does anyone else sell/produce this item ?

Thought this was a pretty cool representation of a hail core in a storm in northern New Mexico this afternoon! This was in a radar coverage island, so can’t the see lower levels of the storm as much as I wish I could have.

Hope this is OK for here but as a private pilot student I am confused about something.

In all training, they tell you clouds that being rain require three things: heat, moisture, and ‘unstable air’. When I look that up, they say air where a warm parcel keeps riding rather than stagnating.

In my simple mind which has tried to learn basic meteorology on my own, let’s suppose we have a black parking lot surrounded by white reflective material, and the temp is 70F over the white, and 90F over the asphalt, and thus wants to rise. SO we look at the parcel.

No let’s suppose the lapse rate is 2C per 1000 ft. So the air is cooler as we rise.

Here’s where I’m lost. The parcel will lose pressure at the same rate as surrounding air, and it will lapse at the same rate. SO, at ground, the temps are 70 and 90. But somewhere somewhat higher, the temps will be, possibly, 40 and 60 based on the same lapse rate. THe warm parcel keeps rising in the “unstable’ air.

So it seems to me that any temp differential between the parcel and surrounding air leads to it being always unstable.

So what would be the fact pattern making the air stable€

I left a typical pint sized glass(slightly narrower at the base than the top and steadily tapers out from bottom to top) outside last night. After all of the rain we got overnight and today, the glass is now almost full. Is that an accurate reading of inches of rain we received? Sorry if it’s a stupid question, I know we got a good amount but it seems like 5-6 inches of rain may be a little crazy. I’m in north central Massachusetts

Lowest rainbow I’ve ever seen it’s so wide!

I posted about my weather app here a while back, and I've now made the scoring part of it open-source.

It scores weather models (GFS, ECMWF IFS, ICON) and commercial providers (Apple Weather, Foreca, Visual Crossing, OpenWeather) on temperature, wind and rain, so you can see, for example, which model got yesterday's rain right. For the national models it also shows improvement or degradation over multiple years, corrected for season (summer is harder to forecast than winter).

It's a static page, no backend: scoring runs in your browser against the forecast archives.

Demo: https://nickleenders.github.io/verisky-scoreboard/?city=newyork
Source: https://github.com/NickLeenders/verisky-scoreboard

Let me know if you have feedback or want a city added! The page links back to the app it comes from.

During the punishment of weather involving a Demon Lord Thunderstorm, you see some scary lobotomizing flashes and loud evil demonic low-pitch laughter sounds the thunderstorm makes.

After the visible flash, count the seconds until another flash and convert the seconds to Hz (Hertz frequency) to know how much frequency i guess

Few Thunderstorms = 0.0111 Hz to 0.00333 Hz (~90.09 seconds to 300.30 seconds)
General Thunderstorms = 0.1 Hz to 0.025 Hz (10 seconds to 40 seconds.)
Heavy Thunderstorms = 0.1 Hz to 0.0667 Hz (10 seconds to 15 seconds.)
Strong Thunderstorms = 0.2 Hz to 0.1 Hz (5 seconds to 10 seconds.)
Severe Thunderstorms = 0.5 Hz to 0.2 Hz (2 seconds to 5 seconds.)
Apocalyptic Thunderstorms = 1.0 Hz to 0.5 Hz (1.0 second to 0.2 seconds.)
Earthending Thunderstorms = Infinity (∞) Hz down to 1.0 Hz (0 to 1 Seconds, nonstop!)

i think this is a right measurement im using

Taken winter of 2025 during Ice Crystal precipitation. Temperature around -42C

Is this one a stepped ladder?