Nick Lutsko
@nick-lutsko.bsky.social
Associate Professor of Climate Science at Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UCSD. More at: https://www.sio-climatephysics.com/ and https://notesonclimate.substack.com/
High-resolution simulations reveal positive global warming feedback from Pacific low clouds www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
High-resolution simulations reveal positive global warming feedback from Pacific low clouds
High-resolution simulations reveal that direct carbon dioxide effects nonlinearly amplify positive low-cloud feedbacks.
science.org
This is an interesting pattern. The surface temp anomalies look wave 4-ish, but a trapped k=4 wave is unlikely in NH summer (jet is too weak). The 500hPa heights and SLP are messier, so the temp pattern is probably a summer stationary wave pattern that was sharpened by surface feedbacks
Robert Rohde@rarohde.bsky.social · 2w agoSee the alternating warm and cold patches in the Northern mid-latitudes? That's the imprint of a quasi-stationary Rossby wave (i.e. oscillations in the jet stream). It's rare to see it so clearly in a monthly-average temperature map.
Following up on @zekehausfather.com post on early 20thC warming, I was surprised how large methane‘s contribution was. Turns out it was swamped after WW2 by faster CO2 emission growth even though CH4 forcing is stronger molecule-for-molecule notesonclimate.substack.com/p/methane-ma...
Methane Mattered More in the Early 20th Century
Zeke Hausfather had an interesting post recently at The Climate Brink on what drove early 20th Century warming, suggesting it was a roughly equal mix of human activity, natural forcings (volcanoes) an...
notesonclimate.substack.com
Wrote about the ways people have implemented physical constraints in ML-driven weather forecast systems: notesonclimate.substack.com/p/physical-c... Physics still matters! But there are also a lot of open questions, and, as an outsider, I think this would benefit from a more systematic approach
notesonclimate.substack.com
The WH has a new EO encouraging the FAA to allow supersonic flight over the US if the plane doesn't create a sonic boom that reaches the ground: www.faa.gov/newsroom/ARM... This actually relies on a fun bit of atmospheric physics, which also shows why this might not be a great idea in practice 🧵
faa.gov
Wrote a summary of Yue Xu‘s recent surface forcing paper notesonclimate.substack.com/p/a-spectral... Our simple model can be combined with similar TOA models to understand the atmospheric forcing, which has some interesting implications for precip changes under solar geo and paleoclimate scenarios
A Spectral Model of CO2's Surface Forcing
Summary of Yue et al. (2026)
notesonclimate.substack.com
We are hiring a postdoc to research Earth's Energy Imbalance using Earth system model simulations and satellite observations. I appreciate anyone spreading the word! docs.google.com/document/d/1...
Postdoctoral Research Associate Position in Earth’s Energy Imbalance
Postdoctoral Research Associate Position in Earth’s Energy Imbalance Department of Climate, Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign The Department of Climate, Mete...
docs.google.com
Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule. Russell Vought is going destroy American Science. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...
Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule
Russell Vought is going destroy American Science
elizabethginexi.substack.com
The RCP8.5 story just seems like good scientific process: 1. we explored a wide scenario space when future warming (emissions & climate sensitivity) was uncertain 2. we focused on high-end cases because damages are nonlinear/tail risks 3. we updated to a narrower scenario space as more data come in
Zeke Hausfather@zekehausfather.com · 3mo agoTwo things can be true: • RCP8.5 was never a realistic "business as usual" scenario • The world has made real progress bending the emissions curve down Glen Peters, Piers Forster, and I explain in a new article: www.theclimatebrink.... 1/11
l’m becoming more sympathetic to Stardust. Past the hype, they’ve raised substantial funding to investigate a promising candidate material for SAI and are now releasing papers. This wouldn’t be unusual in pharma www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/c...
Can Some Very Tiny Particles Cool the Planet? One Tech Company Says Yes.
nytimes.com
From curiosity about nature to leading next-gen climate models, Tapio Schneider, 2026 AMS Jule Charney Medal winner, reflects on his work and the future of climate science. Discover the conversation and what lies ahead for climate science: https://bit.ly/4whEcn4
Award Spotlight: A Conversation with Tapio Schneider
Tapio Schneider is the 2026 recipient of the Jule Charney Medal, recognized “for pioneering research on atmospheric dynamics and climate change and leadership in innovative climate model development.”...
headlines.ametsoc.org
This crescent Earth photo from Artemis shows a nice cross section through the atmosphere, with blue edges where the light passes through the clear upper atmosphere and is Rayleigh scattered and a white middle where the light passes through clouds and aerosols in the lower atmosphere
Glad to see someone finally test QRWA in an idealized setting. It’s always felt like a big jump to go from the linearized 2D vorticity equation (w/many assumptions) to the real atmosphere, where there are many confounding factors
Kevin Anchukaitis@thirstygecko.bsky.social · 3mo agoInteresting: Resonant Rossby wave mechanism for extreme weather performs poorly in simple model test www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
New paper on cloud feedbacks out! urldefense.com/v3/__https:/... Should an enhanced East Pacific warming pattern manifest at equilibrium, our results suggest that CESM2’s high climate sensitivity may be realized.
Cloud feedback overestimated in coupled CESM2 simulations relative to AMIP simulations and satellite observations: importance of the pattern effect and implications for climate sensitivity
Cloud feedback overestimated in coupled CESM2 simulations relative to AMIP simulations and satellite observations: importance of the pattern effect and implications for climate sensitivity, Raghuraman...
urldefense.com
Wrote a follow-up to my last post, on the nuances of model diversity. We've certainly benefited from developing new models and exploring parameter space, but have spent less time establishing reference model hierarchies "of lasting value" notesonclimate.substack.com/p/model-dive...
Model Diversity and Model Hierarchies
"A" hierarchy, or "the" hierarchy?
notesonclimate.substack.com
Wrote about the new approaches people are taking to building climate models: km-resolution, automated tuning, ML emulators… Climate has benefited from having 10s of models to test and compare, now we have new dimensions of model diversity to learn from notesonclimate.substack.com/p/the-many-p...
The Many Possible Futures of Climate Models
Kilometer-scale models, machine learning and model diversity
notesonclimate.substack.com
This is a fun piece about the design challenge of communicating uncertainty in weather apps (though I’d quibble with the claim that climate change is making weather more unpredictable) www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...
Why You Hate Your Weather App
As the weather becomes less predictable, we need forecasts and apps that are better at telling us what we don’t know.
newyorker.com
This looks useful: 'Emulating Natural Climate Variability With InVERT (Internal Variability Emulator for Regional Temperature)' agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...
Emulating Natural Climate Variability With InVERT (Internal Variability Emulator for Regional Temperature)
We present a method for low-cost emulation of spatially resolved natural temperature variability at monthly resolution The emulator output's statistical, spatial, and temporal characteristics res...
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Back to basics: if we want to understand the pattern effect we need to think about wave dynamics
Cristi Proistosescu@cristiproist.bsky.social · 4mo agoMost of my career has been in area of climate science called "the pattern effect". Work over the last decade (including my own) has led to a simple paradigm for the mechanisms of the pattern effect. In this new preprint, we argue this paradigm is woefully insufficient arxiv.org/abs/2603.24488 1/
There’s a fun new study by Google & American Airlines optimizing flight paths to reduce contrails blog.google/innovation-a... These are clear-sky contrails tho & some recent papers suggest in-cloud contrails are much more common (with uncertain warming effects), similar to the ship track debates
Our new study explores how AI can reduce the climate impact of air travel.
Our new study shows what happens when contrail avoidance is built directly into the tools airlines already use.
blog.google
🌍 We're hiring a postdoc at the intersection of cutting-edge #AI and #Earth system science. Help us redefine how we build and evaluate the next generation of climate models. Based at @ucsandiego.bsky.social , funded by Google.org. 🧵
Google.org: Google's philanthropy
Google.org connects nonprofits to funding & additional resources. Learn about our philanthropy program and goal to aid underserved communities.
google.org
Getting direct measurements of CO2 from Pliocene-aged ice has been a Holy Grail of climate science! A new paper by @jmarkspeterson.bsky.social provides a record of CO2 going back 3million years(!), with (let's say) intriguing implications for anthropogenic climate change doi.org/10.1038/s415... 1/
Broadly stable atmospheric CO2 and CH4 levels over the past 3 million years - Nature
Blue ice records from Antarctica are used to determine methane and carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 3 million years.
doi.org
In a new paper led by Yue Xu, w/Daniel Koll, we present an analytic model for CO2 surface forcing agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/... There’s been much recent work building simple spectral models of TOA forcing, we apply similar ideas to the surface
An Analytical Model for CO2 $ Surface Forcing, With Application to the Direct Precipitation Response
An analytical model for CO2 ${\text{CO}}_{2}$’s surface forcing is developed, incorporating the 667 and 1000 cm−1 bands Surface forcing is non-monotonic and peaks at relatively cool surface tempe...
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
New paper with Casey Wall and. @blazgaspa.bsky.social developing an “Analytical Model of the Lifecycle of Tropical Anvil CREs” agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/... We combine a simple radiative transfer param, with cloud spreading and microphysics models to get a pen-and-part model for…
An Analytical Model of the Lifecycle of Tropical Anvil Cloud Radiative Effects
An analytical model is presented for the lifecycle of tropical anvil cloud radiative effects, including for cloud spreading The model reproduces the cloud radiative effect lifecycle seen in a clo...
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Trying something a little different: why do we think of the Sun as yellow and the Moon as white? And why are Martian sunsets blue? notesonclimate.substack.com/p/white-moon...
White Moons, Blue Sunsets
Atmospheric composition and color
notesonclimate.substack.com
My first sole-author paper is now published! 🎉🎉🎉 It's the culmination of a lot of thinking, so I hope you enjoy it. Thanks to the friends, colleagues, and reviewers who helped make this happen 😊 agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...
Andrew Williams@andrewilwilliams.bsky.social · 12mo ago📢📢 New preprint alert! 📢📢 Radiation is a key piece of climate models, but comes with a trade-off: use an accurate scheme (which is difficult to understand), or a simple scheme (which is not very accurate)... Here I introduce a scheme which bridges this gap! arxiv.org/abs/2508.09353
Interesting new paper by @vtcoop.bsky.social argues high Pliocene sensitivity is mostly a pattern effect from non-CO2 factors, esp ice sheets: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Interpretation seems subtle: if ice sheets ~stable Pliocene may be a poor analogue for 21st-century warming (too hot)...
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
pnas.org
@agu.org has a tool to help you submit a comment to NSF on the importance of NCAR: agu.quorum.us/campaign/154... #SaveNCAR
Share your comments on NCAR with NSF
Tell NSF the future that you want for NCAR by 13 March
agu.quorum.us
