Renewable Energy Needs the Weather Enterprise: A call to action

Solar panels with clouds in the background. Photo: Pixabay from Pexels

By Justin Sharp, EPRI

Note: This is a guest blog post; it represents the views of the author alone and not the American Meteorological Society.

Justin Sharp

The “Transition to Carbon-Free Energy Generation” Presidential Session at the AMS 104th Annual Meeting discussed the status of–and barriers to–the U.S. transition to renewable energy. During that panel, I and several other speakers discussed how the weather enterprise will be key to this effort. Meteorological expertise is a keystone of power systems with large shares of renewable energy.

Weather Drives a Vastly More Complex Electric System 

Existing electric systems are some of the largest and most complex machines humankind has ever built, with every component linked and synchronized. Electricity consumption is increasing rapidly as sectors currently powered by fossil fuels switch to electric power, and demands from data centers, AI, and cypto-mining escalate. Many of these new loads, such as electric vehicles and indoor heating/cooling/ventilation systems, are affected by weather, especially temperature. At the same time, extreme weather events continue to cause infrastructure outages, a trend likely to increase with climate change.

Amping up solar and wind power means electricity generation is affected by additional weather variables: wind speed, clouds, and aerosols. Thus, weather-dependent generators, sited across broad geographic areas, produce complex interactions that can have large impacts that were never previously imagined.

Planning and operating such an electric system, day and night, through heat and cold, sun and cloud, wind and calm, with increasing amounts of weather dependent load, using large numbers of wind and solar generators and energy-limited storage devices, is an unprecedented challenge for the sector. 

Better Data for Better Grids

Our ability to forecast renewable energy generation is improving rapidly, and better weather forecasts can reduce uncertainty in our estimates of future generation, easing the integration of renewable energy into grid operations. However, by themselves, even perfect forecasts cannot solve the problem of variability and shortfalls in renewable energy generation across the year. Better historical weather data (and best practices for their use) are vital to plan and build electric systems that can most effectively meet our highly variable energy demand, using diverse power sources and energy storage to ensure reliability across environmental and grid conditions.

Right now, the power sector is blind to a lot of key challenges, with power system planners often relying on weather data that is less certain and more limited than they believe it is. For example, gridded data from numerical weather prediction models are often utilized in planning tools without validation or uncertainty quantification and as if they have observational quality. This can result in important risks being missed. For instance, cold days lead to high electric demand and an increasing risk of infrastructure outages. Such critical days often occur in conjunction with strong inversions; frequently the combination of model resolution and/or parameterizations does not properly handle these inversions, resulting in over-estimates of wind and temperature, and under-estimates in clouds and fog. Issues like these could result in under- or over-building infrastructure, potentially leading to reliability concerns or incurring unnecessary costs.

Building a Weather-Data Infrastructure

Just as meteorologists employ models to diagnose and forecast atmospheric phenomena, electric system specialists utilize power system models to optimally plan and operate the grid. As electric grids evolve to include large amounts of renewable generation and energy storage, ensuring reliable, affordable electric power requires, a) improvement of these models to fully consider the uncertainty inherent in the weather and b) best-in-class, fit-for-purpose weather and climate information to inform the models.

Increasingly detailed records of past weather conditions for large regions and long time histories are needed — yet they typically do not exist as observations and thus must be synthesized. Comprehensive validation of such model data is also essential, along with user education and data curation to ensure that stakeholders appropriately apply weather intelligence in their downstream analyses. 

Assessing, validating, and hopefully bias-correcting weather model estimates requires large quantities of ground-truth weather data. The rapid buildout of wind and solar facilities is producing such a data network, but unfortunately, there is often significant resistance from owners to sharing this data. There’s hope though; the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) now mandates that all renewable generators provide their power and meteorological data to the public. We need to see similar approaches elsewhere, as soon as possible. 

You can learn more about all these issues in an ESIG report I co-authored. In summary, two incredibly complex fields — the electrical grid and atmospheric sciences — are becoming increasingly intertwined. There is a need to work together across sectors to define the requirements for optimal meteorological support for ongoing planning and operation of evolving power grids, and to develop an operational framework for producing, disseminating, and ensuring appropriate use of  this intelligence. EPRI and other organizations are working to convene stakeholders to respond to this urgent need and I encourage interested parties (including data users, data producers, and observational data owners) to contact me at EPRI. Only by working together across sectors can we create the reliable and affordable carbon-free grids needed to power the economy while ensuring a livable future for our planet. 

Header photo: Pixabay from Pexels 

Further Reading

Tornado Risks: Perceptions and Realities

A session spotlight from the 31st Conference on Severe Local Storms

By Katie Pflaumer, AMS Staff

The session “Perception and Risk Associated with Severe Weather” at the 31st Conference on Severe Local Storms highlighted the interactions between severe weather and societal impacts. Here are a few takeaways.

Tornado impacts are increasing across the United States–despite variation in where tornadoes hit. A presentation by Stephen Strader (Villanova University) highlighted the importance of considering all factors to understand tornado impacts, not just climate. Using 40 years of observational data, plus a statistical model depicting changes in societal factors, researchers found that increased housing and population growth in tornado-prone areas is a key driver of increased tornado damage/human risk. 

While the number of days with tornadoes is trending down in the U.S. Southern Plains and trending upward in the mid-South; the likelihood of tornado damage has increased in both regions due to increased human occupation. However, the combination of tornado increases with population growth and spread has tripled tornado impact potential in the mid-South since 1980, surpassing the Southern Plains. Strader noted that stricter enforcement of building codes, investments in tornado shelters and safe rooms, and public education could help mitigate tornado damages–if scientists can get across the message that human factors matter.


“We have to get away from this idea that climate change is a cause of a disaster … climate change is a contributor to a disaster, not a cause. [Disaster] is inherently linked to societal factors. … With environmental changes and exposure changes/housing growth, you see an increasingly disaster-prone society.”

—Stephen Strader

Graphic from: Strader, S.M., Gensini, V.A., Ashley, W.S., and A.N. Wagner (2024) “Changing Tornado Environments Vs. Changing Societal Vulnerability and Exposure.” (Poster presented at 31st Conference on Severe Local Storms, October 21.) Originally from Strader et al. (2024), “Changes in tornado risk and societal vulnerability leading to greater tornado impact potential.” NPJ Natural Hazards, 19 June. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44304-024-00019-6

Wireless Emergency Alerts are critical—and confusing—for Spanish speakers in the U.S. Southeast. A study presented by Joseph Trujillo-Falcón (University of Illinois) found that Spanish-language wireless emergency alerts (WEAs, phone notifications about severe weather) from the National Weather Service are crucial safety tools. For some tornado survivors in Kentucky, for example, the WEA had been their only trigger to get to safety. In-depth conversations with 27 Spanish speakers from across the U.S. found that WEAs were highly respected and useful, yet needed some redesign to avoid confusion. For example, the Spanish translation of the NWS acronym (SNM) called to mind medical conditions or kink. The word “proyectiles” (projectiles), used to warn about airborne debris, evoked war zone imagery rather than weather. Using the word “aviso” for “warning” struck many as less urgent than the term “alerta.” In addition, 360-word warnings (versus those of 90 words or less) helped readers better understand what was going on and what to do in response. This was especially important for people who hadn’t encountered a tornado in their country of origin. Direct links to information and instructions on how and where to shelter were also seen as key, especially in areas with many mobile or manufactured homes.

“The information source that I take most seriously as a recently arrived immigrant are WEAs. Since everyone gets it at the same time, if one ignores it, the other reads it.”

—Gabriela, Venezuelan immigrant who has limited English proficiency (Trujillo-Falcón 2024).

People want different forecast information as a threat evolves. A study presented by Makenzie Krocak (National Severe Storms Laboratory) analyzed data from the Severe Weather and Society survey to determine what information members of the public want and need at different times in relation to weather threats. They found that respondents’ priorities changed over time. In longer time frames (e.g., three days in advance) survey respondents overwhelmingly ranked location information and event probability as the most valuable information; people wanted to know, ‘Should I prepare for severe weather to occur in my area?’ A day to an hour in advance, people wanted to know about the timing of the event, as well as its potential severity. In the warning time frame (60 minutes or less) their desire for information about potential impacts and necessary protective actions increased.

For additional insight, the researchers painstakingly categorized, geo-located, and analyzed 9000+ social media comments from the National Weather Service Facebook and Twitter/X accounts before and after severe weather events. A poster presented by undergraduate student Emily Allen (University of Louisiana Monroe) delved into this side of the equation.

Emily Allen with her poster, “Assessing Public Information Needs Leading Up to Severe Weather Events.” (E.A. Allen and M. Krocak, 2024)

Three days out from an event, commenters largely asked about the chance of an event happening, but for nearer time frames, location became the dominant question—i.e., ‘Will this hit my specific area?’ Krocak emphasized the need to include very clear landmarks in warning graphics to help people find their location. She also noted that certain groups still require information about protective actions to take—especially those with the least experience dealing with a particular hazard.

Making severe weather products usable and understandable. Two presentations dealt with public perceptions of evolving probabilistic weather forecast information—that is, communicating changes in severe weather risks across time and geography. 

Christopher Wirz (NSF NCAR) presented preliminary results of a study about public perceptions of evolving probabilistic tornado forecasts and warnings. On average, respondents’ sense of risk was about the same as for a deterministic (e.g., warning vs no-warning) forecast; most were likely to be on high alert during a tornado warning in any case, and not underestimate their risk. However, there were differences in how participants responded based on where they were located relative to a given warning polygon. For example, some felt they were in more danger if they were ‘in front’ of the warning polygon, despite the graphics showing equal tornado risk in other directions. Warn-on forecasts—alerts issued when a significant risk is predicted, often long before a tornado is detected by radar—were seen as less actionable by some, but others appreciated knowing to ‘keep an eye out.’ Overall, the study found that members of the public don’t take probabilistic information at face value—rather, they interpret it based on context, including existing local knowledge and other warning products they encounter. In addition, for half of the respondents, level of trust in a forecast didn’t change when they received more/updated information, because trust was instead based on how much they trusted the source of the forecast.

Kristin Calhoun (NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory) presented about new products and communications that are in development to help NWS forecasters and emergency managers use storm-based probabilistic hazard information (PHI) in the severe weather watch-warning timeframe. These included PHI tools layered with threats-in-motion (TIM) information, in which warning polygons are moved (and removed) with the motion of the storm, helping downstream areas prepare sooner and allowing those for whom danger has passed to redeploy their resources more strategically; potential new protocols for the NOAA/NWS Storm Prediction Center, rather than local weather forecast offices, to add or remove an area from a watch/warning once the threat has passed; a blended PHI plus warn-on forecast product that can help emergency managers plan better by seeing storms in motion along with trends in likelihood and potential impact; and a new product based on SPC’s ‘Mesoscale Discussions,’ created by local NWS forecasters and called ‘Local Discussions,’ with an increased focus on potential impacts, timing, and location of hazards versus highly technical information.

Photo: National Severe Storms Laboratory, Watch-to-Warning Experiment.

Social pressure may impact campus tornado safety. Alicia Klees (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) presented work conducted largely by undergraduate student Kyla Wolski that has implications for student safety. The University of Illinois’s Illini-Alert system warns students when tornado threats are approaching; most students are aware of the alerts, and most have experienced a tornado warning before. Students were asked in a survey what they would do if they were in a vulnerable location—such as a fourth-floor classroom with glass windows—and received a tornado warning. 75% said they would change their location to seek shelter. However, when a hypothetical professor kept teaching through a tornado warning (as some faculty reportedly did during the last real tornado warning on campus), 22% of students who had planned to seek shelter said they would probably stay in class. These students said they trusted the professor’s judgment—yet professors do not receive extensive formal training on tornado safety. Klees recalled an anecdote from a student in which one faculty member remarked, “I don’t hear the sirens anymore, so it’s fine.”

In addition, most students did not view tornadoes as a major risk, and most were unaware that tornadoes could happen at any time of year. Klees identified future collaborations with Emergency Management to survey faculty and TAs on tornado warning response, with the goal of keeping students safe.

If you are registered for the 31st Conference on Severe Local Storms, you can view the full session recording at this link.

About the 31st Conference on Severe Local Storms

The American Meteorological Society’s 31st Conference on Severe Local Storms takes place 21-25 October, 2024, in Virginia Beach, VA, and online. The conference is the premiere gathering for scientists, forecasters, educators, and communicators engaged in all aspects of work related to hazardous deep convective weather phenomena. Attendees present and discuss cutting-edge research regarding the analysis, prediction, communication, and theoretical understanding of the structure and dynamics of severe thunderstorms, including their associated hazards of tornadoes, damaging winds, large hail, lightning, and flash floods. View the conference program here.

Can Decarbonizing the Electric Grid Help Avert Climate Catastrophe?

Photo by Harry Cunningham @harry.digital: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-wind-turbines-under-cloudy-sky-3619870/

A Presidential Session Spotlight from the AMS 104th Annual Meeting

By Katie Pflaumer, AMS Staff

Significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions requires transitioning primarily to carbon-free sources for energy generation, but many challenges stand in the way. What are these challenges, and how can the weather, water, and climate sector help meet them?

A Presidential Session at the 104th AMS Annual Meeting addressed those questions with panelists Debbie Lew (Executive Director at ESIG, the Energy Systems Integration Group), Alexander “Sandy” MacDonald (former AMS President and former director of the NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory), Aidan Tuohy (Director of Transmission Operations and Planning at EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute), and Justin Sharp (then Owner and Principal of Sharply Focused, now Technical Leader in the Transmission and Operations Planning team at EPRI). Here are some key points that arose from the session, titled, “Transition to Carbon-Free Energy Generation,” introduced by NSF NCAR’s Jared Lee, and moderated by MESO, Inc.’s John Zack.

Key Points

  • Decarbonizing the electric grid is key to reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
  • Wind and solar are now the cheapest forms of energy generation; adoption is increasing, but not fast enough to catch up with the likely growth in demand. 
  • Energy demand is rapidly increasing, driven by the expansion of data centers, AI applications, crypto mining, and the electrification of transportation and heating. Hydrogen production might greatly increase future loads. 
  • “Massive buildouts” of both renewable energy plants AND transmission infrastructure are required to reduce emissions. 
  • A reliable and affordable power system with large shares of wind and solar generation requires accurate historical weather information to inform infrastructure buildout, and accurate forecasts to support operations. 
  • To avoid expensive infrastructure that’s only used during peak times, electricity pricing must incentivize consumers to avoid excessive use during periods of high demand. This requires accurate weather forecasting. 
  • Connecting the three main national grids together into a “supergrid” could improve transmission and grid flexibility, significantly reducing emissions.

The need for carbon-free energy is urgent

Greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing sharply. In response, global temperatures are rising faster than even the most pessimistic models would have predicted a few decades ago, noted Lee in his introductory remarks to the panel. The U.S. is the second largest global carbon emitter, despite having a much smaller population than the other top emitters, China and India.

If we don’t solve the greenhouse gas problem by mid-century, warned MacDonald, we will soon hit 700 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If that happens, “We’re back to the Miocene era,” he said, referencing an exceptionally hot period around 12.5 million years ago. “Northern Hemisphere land temperatures will be 11 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. Arctic temps will be 17°F warmer, which is probably going to launch a huge permafrost thaw … The ocean will be 80% more acidic. So we are in an urgent situation.”

What’s the path to a more sustainable future? Decarbonizing the grid.

The energy sector is one of the top sources of U.S. emissions—and reducing emissions there will have knock-on effects in buildings and transportation. Lee noted that wind and solar power have dropped dramatically in price, becoming the cheapest forms of energy generation available. This has led to an increase in adoption: renewables are now second only to natural gas in terms of electrical power generated in the United States. Yet natural gas is still growing fast, and still far exceeds the use of renewables.

Therefore, Lew said in her talk, we need “massive buildouts of [wind, solar, and battery] resources … doubling or even tripling the amount of installed capacity. We’re going to be electrifying buildings, transportation, industry [and] massively building out transmission and distribution networks … And we’re going to be using fossil fuel generators for reliability needs.” Doing this could get us to 80-90% fossil-free energy production.

Bridging the gap

But what about that last 10–20%?

“We need some kind of cost-effective, clean, firm resource” to fill in the gaps and act as a bridge fuel—a resource that’s available 24/7 no matter the weather or season—said Lew. This resource might end up being hydrogen, advanced nuclear energy, or even green bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration to offset emissions from natural gas. “We need all options on the table.”

Weather? Or not?

Trying to transition to renewables without incorporating reliability and resilience will lead to blackouts and power outages, Tuohy noted. These would have major economic consequences and reduce the political viability of renewables, as well as leading to unjust allocation of energy.

A resilient grid, he said, requires enough energy production to meet future demand; adequate transmission and delivery infrastructure to meet future needs and to balance supply with demand moment-to-moment every day; reliability despite constant shifts in energy production; and the ability to prevent a problem in one place from causing cascading outages across the system. 

Making a new, wind- and solar-dependent grid truly work means balancing—and forecasting—energy availability and demand across the nation, accounting for the current and predicted weather at each solar and wind energy site, as well as how climate change will affect resource availability. This means a massive meteorological infrastructure must be created.

Read our upcoming post from Justin Sharp to learn more about how weather and renewable energy must work together.

“[This is] an operational need, not a research project … There’s an imperative to have dedicated, accurate, and expertly curated weather information to support the energy transition.”

—Justin Sharp

Uncertainty

Demands on the grid are now subject to extreme variability, not just from weather and climate, Tuohy said. For example, demand projections from 2022 versus 2023 were radically different because of new energy-intensive data centers coming online.

“We’ve gone from a kind of deterministic system — [in which we] had good sense of, our peak demand’s going to happen in July—to a far more stochastic and variable type, both on the demand and the supply side,” said Tuohy. We have a lot of data and computational tools, but we must be able to bring those datasets together effectively so we can analyze and predict change. “We need to … develop tools that account for [uncertainty].”

Changing behavior

The infrastructure required for the necessary expansion of renewable energy generation will be expensive. Keeping the cost manageable means not wasting money to build extra infrastructure that’s only useful during times of peak demand. That means we need to avoid high peaks in energy use.

We know that people can be a lot more conscientious about energy consumption if they think it will save them money. Yet many consumers are currently sheltered from the financial consequences of overloading the grid. “There’s tremendous flexibility in load if you … expose consumers to better price signals,” Lew said.

Consumers could be financially incentivized, for example, to choose off-peak times to turn on a heater or charge an electric vehicle. Such programs should be carefully designed to minimize negative impacts on vulnerable consumers, but the fact remains that to keep those consumers safe, the climate crisis must be confronted.

Supergrid to the rescue?

The main problem with a renewable energy grid, the speakers acknowledged, is transmission—both connecting new generators and moving energy based on supply and demand. “You’ve got to be able to move wind and solar energy around at continental scales,” said MacDonald. A study by ESIG suggested that simply adding a 2-gigawatt transmission line connecting the Texas power grid with the Eastern U.S. power grid would effectively act like 4 GW of extra electricity generating capacity across the two regions, because their grids experience risk and stress at different, complementary times.

A 2016 paper MacDonald and colleagues published in Nature Climate Change suggests that U.S. electricity-sector carbon emissions could be decreased by 80% — with current technology and without increased electricity costs — if the United States can implement a “supergrid.” That means connecting all three major electrical grids currently serving the continental United States. When it’s sunny in San Jose and snowing in Cincinnati, you could transmit solar-produced energy to keep Ohio homes warm, rather than generating extra power locally. 

It will take a lot of effort, but “if we [start implementing a supergrid] now, in a 40-year transition, we can preserve the environment we have,” MacDonald said. “If we wait until the 2040s, we are basically going to devastate the planet’s life for thousands of years.”

You can view all the AMS 104th Annual Meeting presentations online. Watch this Presidential Session.

Photo at top: Harry Cunningham on Pexels (@harry.digital)

Successful Science Policy Means Advocating for People

Joseph Patton with his legislative science advocacy group for the Geosciences Congressional Visit Day in front of Maryland Rep. Ivey’s office.

By Joseph Patton, Faculty Researcher for the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center at the University of Maryland, College Park

Note: This is a guest blog post; it represents the views of the author alone and not the American Meteorological Society or the AMS Policy Program. Geosciences Congressional Visits Day is non-partisan, and promotes policy engagement without advocating for particular viewpoints. AMS has not taken a position on the legislation discussed by the author in this post.

In the pursuit of scientific advancements which benefit our communities, sometimes society and lawmakers lose perspective of the research workforce. A significant portion of scientific labor is done by postgraduate students and early-career professionals who often struggle to make ends meet while living in the large, expensive urban areas where their institutions are located. This puts undue financial stress on people who are already working long hours through nights and weekends to find and implement solutions to global problems. This financial insecurity threatens not only the livelihoods of these individuals, but also the quality of their work. No matter their academic wherewithal, someone who is constantly worried about making rent or affording groceries that month may accomplish less, or experience failing mental and physical health. I’ve noticed in my own work extreme disparities in pay for graduate researchers at higher education institutions that are just a few miles apart from each other in Maryland. I believe that it is paramount to our goals of advancing scientific research to ensure that the researchers carrying out this work are able to meet the basic needs of life.

That is why, this September, I was excited to take part in the Geosciences Congressional Visits Day (GEO-CVD) hosted by the AMS and other Earth science societies. GEO-CVD provides a one-day workshop on the federal policy process, followed by a day of visiting Congressional offices, meeting with staff to discuss issues that participants feel are important. My group, which included colleagues from the University of Maryland system, traveled to Capitol Hill to discuss several bills which directly address the financial and residential insecurities of the backbone of our scientific research workforce. 

Our team met with the staff of the two Maryland senators, as well as the representative for the Congressional district including the University of Maryland.

The Bills

One bill for which my group advocated was the RESEARCHER Act, which directs the White House Office of Science and Technology to develop new policies and guidelines for federal research agencies to address the underlying causes of financial insecurity for student and early-career researchers. It would then require federal agencies to implement these policies. Such policies might include standardizing the pay of graduate and early-career researchers working under federal grants at public universities such as UMD, or new guidelines on official employment status and the availability of adequate, affordable healthcare, in addition to more issues surrounding their quality of life.

Joseph Patton stands in front of the U.S. Capitol Building (Photo: Joseph Patton)

Another bill we advocated for is the Keep STEM Talent Act. The United States attracts some of the best talent from all throughout the world with our first-rate universities and research institutions. Yet in addition to broad financial insecurities, many foreign nationals struggle with challenges in maintaining residency in the United States. The Keep STEM Talent Act would exempt researchers with a master’s degree or higher in their field of study from immigration limitations when seeking an immigration visa as a step toward permanent residency status. It would also allow those individuals to pursue an immigrant visa even while living in the country on a non-immigrant visa (e.g., a student visa). This would give the top minds in STEM fields a more secure way to approach living and working in the United States, while maintaining their ability to study and work at American universities in the meantime. Such changes would benefit the research capabilities of institutions across America and nurture the careers of scientists like my colleague Daile Zhang, a foreign national from China and a pioneering lightning researcher. After working in the United States for nearly a decade, she just this fall accepted a tenure-track faculty position at the University of North Dakota.

Joseph Patton, left, with his legislative science advocacy group for the Geosciences Congressional Visit Day in front of Sen. Van Hollen’s office (Photo: Joseph Patton)

Being Heard

Experiencing what it’s like to walk down the winding halls and seemingly endless basements of the buildings surrounding the U.S. Capitol Building was a career-defining opportunity. We briefly got to meet, in person, our representative in Congress, and feel like our voices were heard. We discussed issues close to us as researchers and as people. We genuinely feel empowered by the opportunity to effect change both in Maryland and at a federal level.

One thing I’ve learned from my career so far (I’ve been a graduate student, a federal employee, and now a faculty researcher), is that nearly every researcher is in their niche STEM field because they are incredibly passionate about the work that they do. Whether that’s an astrobiologist studying how to grow plants on Mars, a chemical engineer finding the next breakthrough in energy storage, or an oncologist working on the cure for a specific type of cancer, we blur the lines between work and personal time and spend long hours in the lab or at our workstations because our work is a part of who we are as people. It’s not for money, fame, or even recognition; it’s to make sense of the complicated natural world in which we all live, explore new possibilities, help people feel safe and secure in a sustainable way of life, and better our communities. When we take care of researchers, we all benefit from the result.

I want to send a sincere and heartfelt thank you to the American Meteorological Society for offering us the opportunity to learn about the science policy process as our team set out to advocate for issues that are close to us as researchers. I also want to send a special thanks to Emma Tipton, a policy fellow with AMS, for helping us individually work on our messaging and guiding us through the maze (literally and figuratively) of Congressional advocacy. We appreciate the time and efforts of the Congressional staffers and legislative aides for Senators Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen as well as Representative Glenn Ivey.

<<Joseph Patton (center) stands on the steps of the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol Building with his fellow legislative science policy advocates (Photo: Emma Tipton)

Photo at top: Joseph Patton with his legislative science advocacy group for the Geosciences Congressional Visit Day in front of Maryland Rep. Ivey’s office. (Photo: Joseph Patton)

About Geosciences Congressional Visits Day

Geosciences Congressional Visits Days (GEO-CVD) is a two-day, non-partisan science policy workshop hosted by AMS alongside other Earth science societies. Participants learn about Congress and build relationships with Congressional offices, to help ensure that Members of Congress and their staffs have access to the best available scientific information relating to weather, water and climate.

Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month Spotlight: Dr. Maria J. Molina

In recognition of National Hispanic Heritage Month (15 September-15 October), the American Meteorological Society is spotlighting the amazing careers and contributions of a few of our Latinx/Hispanic community members. 

This week, we hear from Dr. Maria J. Molina!

What is your current work? Can you tell us a bit about it?

I am currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. One of my favorite parts of my job includes conducting research with graduate and undergraduate students, where we use machine learning to answer questions we have about weather and climate. I also get to teach courses like Physical Meteorology and Neural Networks for the Physical Sciences, both of which are really fun!

What was an important moment in your early career?

My years spent at the National Center for Atmospheric Research as an Advanced Study Program (ASP) postdoc and a project scientist were critically important for my career. During my time there, I gained confidence in myself as a scientist through the realization that it’s totally fine to not know things, and that we can always learn and grow at any age. I was able to see world-class scientists say, “I don’t know how to do that,” and then ask others for help, building professional collaborations and learning along the way. This is such a rewarding part of being a scientist; plus, it makes for a much more inclusive work environment.

What is something you’re proud of professionally?

By far, the professional experience I am most proud of is seeing students grow as researchers and critical thinkers. It is immensely rewarding when students start resolving their own software and methodology hurdles, and start coming up with research questions and ways to answer them on their own.

Are there ways in which your Hispanic/Latinx heritage has influenced or enriched your career?

Most definitely. As a Hispanic/Latinx immigrant that experienced extreme weather events growing up in South Florida, I empathize with vulnerable communities that experience extreme weather, oftentimes having to navigate complex decisions with language and cultural barriers. It has helped me appreciate the work done by social scientists and keep the human component of the Earth systems in mind as I conduct my research.

Learn more about Dr. Molina here.

Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month Spotlight: Anthony Yanez

In recognition of National Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15-October 15), the American Meteorological Society is spotlighting the amazing careers and contributions of a few of our Latinx/Hispanic community members. 

This week, we hear from Anthony Yanez!

What is your current work? Can you tell us a bit about it?

I recently became the Chief Meteorologist at KPRC 2, the NBC affiliate in Houston, Texas. This has been a long-time goal to reach, and it finally happened July 1st.

What was an important moment in your early career?

My career began in the sports department in my hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. After several years, I transitioned to the newsroom as a reporter and anchor. A pivotal moment in my career occurred when my boss saw a potential in me in another department. He said, “You have a better personality for weather. I’m moving you to the weather department.” His insight led me to discover a love for meteorology. Under the mentorship of Mike Hernandez, the chief meteorologist at the time, I received invaluable guidance that significantly shaped my career.

What is something you’re proud of professionally?

A highlight of my career was receiving the 2022 AMS Award for Excellence in Science Reporting by a Broadcast Meteorologist. My work in Los Angeles, covering wildfires, oceans, and climate issues, was both impactful and deeply fulfilling.

Are there ways in which your Hispanic/Latinx heritage has influenced or enriched your career?

As a Hispanic professional, I take pride in serving as a role model for the rapidly growing Hispanic community in the United States. During school visits, I make it a point to tell students that if I can achieve success, they can too. Additionally, my involvement with the Hispanic community in Houston, including serving as a past president of the Houston Association of Hispanic Media Professionals, enables me to support aspiring journalists by awarding college scholarships to deserving students.

Learn more about Anthony Yanez here.

Photo at top courtesy of Anthony Yanez.

How is Weather Research Changing?

A 2024 AMS Summer Community Meeting highlight

The AMS Summer Community Meeting (SCM) drew exceptional attendance and engagement this year as people across sectors helped inform a major upcoming report on the Weather Enterprise. The AMS Weather Enterprise Study will provide a comprehensive picture of the shifting landscape of weather-related fields to inform our joint future. At the 2024 SCM, working groups discussed what they’d found about key issues facing the enterprise, and asked for feedback from the community. 

Here are a few takeaways from the Research Enterprise working group, as reported by Daniel Rothenberg of Brightband.

Photo courtesy of Daniel Rothenberg.

How has the weather research landscape shifted in the last decade or so?

Two of the most important shifts have been a movement of exploratory and applied research from the public to the private sector, and the rise in importance of “data science” and other hybrid roles blending a mixture of domain expertise and broader engineering and technical skills. 

Possibly the biggest example of these shifts coming together has been the advent of AI-based weather forecasting tools, although it also shows in trends such as the rise of private companies operating earth observation platforms.

What were the principal themes that came out of your working group’s discussions?

One major theme we discussed was the balance of responsibilities across the traditional weather enterprise. Initiatives such as building and launching satellite constellations or developing new weather models were at one point solely within the remit of the public sector (due to complexity and cost), but are now commonly undertaken by the private sector – sometimes even at start-up companies.

This re-balancing opens as many opportunities as it does challenges, and leads to another major theme: how we can best prepare for the workforce needs of today and tomorrow. Meteorologists will increasingly need to apply technical skills such as software development and data science alongside ones from the social sciences; preparing our current and future workforce for these demands will be a challenge in its own right.

A third major theme is that the weather enterprise is getting bigger. We’re not just a community of meteorologists anymore. Increasingly, critical work related to weather, water, climate, and their impacts on society is being undertaken beyond the traditional boundaries of our enterprise. There is a significant opportunity to improve society’s resilience if we as a community are able to build relationships with the new institutions working on these issues in a collaborative, interdisciplinary manner.

What are the main challenges you have identified?

Better accounting for how we ought to invest limited – and declining – federal resources will be a significant and contentious challenge, only complicated by the shifts in priorities and capabilities across the enterprise.

Those shifts motivate a second key challenge, which is clarifying who in the enterprise is accountable for, or has ownership over, certain areas. For example, NOAA makes available nearly all of the observations used in its operational forecast models, with some exceptions for proprietary data from commercial entities. But as more private companies try to sell data to NOAA, how will this balance hold? What if those private companies move towards selling actual weather modeling capabilities or services – perhaps a proprietary AI-based weather model – to the government? In the case of expanding commercial data purchases, who is responsible for maintaining and improving our data assimilation capabilities? 

Coordinating many actors across the enterprise, in a manner that most effectively serves our mission to society, will be a key challenge we must navigate in the coming years.

What preliminary recommendations or future directions have you discussed?

Our tentative recommendations revolve around building robustness. We encourage academic organizations who train our future meteorologists to consider how to prepare these students to work in a multidisciplinary capacity, and to embrace data science skills. Not everyone needs to be an interdisciplinary scientist, but it’s vital that our students learn how to apply their deep domain knowledge as part of a team of such individuals.

We also acknowledge that the rise of AI/ML techniques is changing the demands of our computing and data infrastructure. Not only must our workforce learn to adapt to these technologies, but we must consider how the enterprise will support enabling them: for example, by ensuring that in addition to large, traditional high-performance computing resources, we provide access to GPUs and similar tools. As part of this re-evaluation, we must evolve the ways in which we as a community define our priorities for federal research funding

What did you hear from the community at the SCM?

We thank the community for the warm reception to our assessments at the Summer Community Meeting. Many of the themes we touched on – the re-balancing of capabilities across the enterprise, the emergence of AI/ML and its implications, as well as core workforce development concerns – were echoed across many other working groups, underscoring their importance.

Within our group, we also discussed the growing importance of convergence science, which was echoed several times throughout the meeting. Convergence science, which involves coordinating diverse, interdisciplinary research teams with real stakeholders to solve societally relevant problems, is likely to be an important mechanism of translational research in the future, but we (and others at the meeting) identified a need for federal agencies to devote more resources earmarked for this sort of work in order to complement traditional, siloed funding programs.

Want to join a Weather Enterprise Study working group? Email [email protected].

About the Weather Enterprise Study

The AMS Policy Program, working closely with the volunteer leadership of the Commission on the Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise, is conducting a two-year effort (2023-2025) to assess how well the weather enterprise is performing, and to potentially develop new recommendations for how it might serve the public even better. Learn more here, give us your input via Google Forms, or get involved by contacting [email protected].  

About the AMS Summer Community Meeting

The AMS Summer Community Meeting (SCM) is a special time for professionals from academia, industry, government, and NGOs to come together to discuss broader strategic priorities, identify challenges to be addressed and opportunities to collaborate, and share points of view on pressing topics. The SCM provides a unique, informal setting for constructive deliberation of current issues and development of a shared vision for the future. The 2024 Summer Community Meeting took place August 5-6 in Washington, DC, and focused special attention on the Weather Enterprise, with opportunities for the entire community to learn about, discuss, debate, and extend some of the preliminary findings coming from the AMS Weather Enterprise Study.

Celebrating Peer Review Week, 2024!

Banners of 12 AMS journals laid out in a grid

In support of its mission to advance science for the benefit of society, the American Meteorological Society publishes 12 peer-reviewed, highly regarded scientific journals. Over four thousand individual volunteer reviewers contribute reviews to AMS journals every year.

Peer reviewers are subject-matter experts who volunteer their time both to advise journal editors on the suitability of a manuscript for publication and to provide guidance to authors in improving the accuracy and readability of their study. Peer reviewers’ careful evaluation of manuscripts is essential to scientific communication. 

During Peer Review Week each September AMS highlights recipients of the AMS Editor’s Award, which is given for excellence in reviewing. AMS reviewers almost always do their work anonymously, so the Editor’s Award and Peer Review Week are rare opportunities to thank at least some reviewers by name, and give them an opportunity to share their thoughts on this essential but unsung task.

For more about peer review in AMS publications, check out Peer Review Week 2024!

Why is peer review important?

Eric Firing

“Peer review is not infallible, especially at the level of each individual paper, but it is an important mechanism for steering science in the long run towards better descriptions of how the world works.”

-Eric Firing, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Christopher Pitt Wolfe

“[As a researcher] It’s often harder to explain what you’ve done than to do it in the first place. It’s easy to develop your own vocabulary for a problem that’s opaque to outside readers. A good reviewer will point out where my arguments are unclear and sometimes even help me clarify them. In the process, this often helps clarify my own thinking on the problem.”

-Christopher Pitt Wolfe, Stony Brook University

What keeps you motivated to review?

“I learn something from nearly every manuscript I review … One advantage of being a reviewer is to have the opportunity to read a manuscript that has not been published yet.”

-Lili Lei, Nanjing University, China

Lili Lei

“In doing peer reviews, I have learned about new topics, methodologies, and trends in the field.”

-Will Cheng, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

William Cheng

“From both the perspective of a reviewer and an author, the review process often provides new angles of how your studies are comprehended by people whose expertise is different from yours. I find that both annoying (of course!) and enlightening.”

-Yunji Zhang, The Pennsylvania State University

Yunji Zhang

“I’ve learned a lot of science from reviewing. Often, you have to read up on concepts that you don’t know well enough. Or you try to reproduce some results and, in the process, find something interesting.”

-Ingo Richter, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC)

Ingo Richter

How do you approach the task of reviewing?

Stephen Strader

“It takes a lot of time to get research published. Reviewers are volunteers that take time out of their own work and lives to provide constructive feedback for people they may not know. It is a thankless job most of the time. Also, we don’t make up the rules as we go. We have standards and following those standards helps maintain objectivity and push the collective understanding of a given topic. Patience and understanding are key. It takes effort to provide a constructive and thorough review.”

-Stephen Strader, Villanova University

Gan Zhang

“Be purposefully constructive. The AMS provides great reviewer instructions. When following those instructions and drafting comments, I remind myself that my comments should serve the journal, the scientific enterprise, and the authors. I find it straightforward to focus on the first two, but the last is hard to deliver without some purposeful thinking. In practice, the outcome can too easily be comments that are excessively harsh or too generic to be helpful for authors. Thoughtful reviews can make a difference, especially for an early-career researcher. For example, reviewers offered specific suggestions that helped me improve my writing and research. By correcting my rookie mistakes early, those reviewers also spared the reviewers of my later studies some headaches. This is the power of being purposefully constructive.”

-Gan Zhang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Noah Samuel Brauer

“The most important thing to keep in mind when reviewing a manuscript is to provide unbiased, objective, and constructive feedback to the authors. It is important to ensure that the methods/science is sound, which can be done by providing constructive comments and suggestions that the authors can use to improve the quality and robustness of their work.”

-Noah Samuel Brauer, NOAA/NWS Weather Prediction Center

Young-Ha Kim

“A paper should contribute to the current understanding of the topic. This could be a new discovery, a support or challenge of existing knowledge, or insights that can stimulate discussion in the community. As a reviewer, these are the aspects I focus on. However, it’s important to remember that reviewers are only the first judges of the paper — ultimately, readers will also assess it (and the reviewers’ judgment).”

-Young-Ha Kim, Seoul National University

Christopher Pitt Wolfe

“Everything should make sense in detail. If something doesn’t make sense, it could be wrong or simply not explained well (usually the latter). There should be enough information that a reader reasonably familiar with the field could reproduce the results (or at least the analysis) given sufficient time and resources.”

-Christopher Pitt Wolfe, Stony Brook University

Varvara Zemskova

“Whenever I review a manuscript, I try to make sure that it is pedagogical. That is, I want to make sure that if an early stage graduate student were to read it, they would be able to understand the background and gaps in the literature and follow the methodology. When I approach peer review through this lens, it helps identify areas that may be unclear to readers who are not experts in the specific subtopic, and overall improve the flow of the narrative.”

-Varvara Zemskova, University of Waterloo, Canada

Nathan Lenssen

“Advice I was given at some point (can’t remember from who) is that most manuscripts will get accepted somewhere. Thus, it is your job as a reviewer to help the authors get the manuscript accepted at the submitted journal if at all possible. This attitude has helped me feel aligned with the authors, rather than a gatekeeper.”

-Nathan Lenssen, Colorado School of Mines and NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research

What has reviewing taught you about the scientific process?

“Peer review may sound like a dry, boring, non-stimulating activity. But in reality, peer review requires creative and critical thinking, and often I learn new facts about topics related to atmospheric science and/or am exposed to new ways of thinking about subjects I already know a lot about. Performing peer review has expanded my worldview and helped me develop the skill of examining issues from perspectives not native to my own history.”

-Jeffrey Duda, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science, Earth System Research Lab

Jeffrey Duda

“To borrow from something I heard recently from a grade-school science teacher, it’s important to understand that science is never finished. Even if a study has been rigorously evaluated through peer review, in the future new data, methods, or interpretations could lead to a different set of conclusions. That being said, we can still take actions in response to the best information we have available, especially if the same conclusions have been found by multiple studies examining a question from many different angles.”

-Patrick Alexander, Columbia University

Patrick Michael Alexander

Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month Spotlight: Dr. Annareli Morales

Dr. Annareli Morales

In recognition of National Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15-October 15), the American Meteorological Society is spotlighting the amazing careers and contributions of a few of our Latinx/Hispanic community members. This week, we hear from Dr. Annareli Morales!

What is your current work? Can you tell us a bit about your research?

I am the air quality policy analyst for Weld County in northern Colorado. I’ve been working at the Department of Public Health and Environment for about 1.5 years. In my role, I’m responsible for performing data, legislative, and regulation review: gathering input from inside and outside our local government and providing recommendations to elected officials/department leadership as a subject matter expert. I am a resource on air quality related topics for boards, staff, towns/cities, and the general public.

What was an important moment in your early career? 

Being selected to the NSF Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) program at UCAR/NCAR was an important moment in undergrad. The program helped me grow my scientific network and learn professional skills like data analysis, research, public speaking, presenting technical information in a digestible manner, scientific writing, and much more. I was able to try different research subjects until I found the one that resonated with me. I also made wonderful, life-long friends who have supported me throughout my career and collaborated with me to change the culture in academia to a more inclusive and equitable one.

What is something you’re proud of professionally? 

I’m proud of so many things, but the most recent is receiving the 2025 AMS Early Career Achievement Award. It fills my heart with joy to know that I made an impression in the lives of people who took the time to prepare a nomination package (it’s A LOT of work), and that my colleagues decided I was representative of what this award is intended to celebrate.

Are there ways in which your Hispanic/Latinx heritage has influenced or enriched your career?

My Mexican-American heritage has influenced my decisions throughout my career. Every time I think about science communication I think, “Would my mom be able to understand this?” I make sure I can express in both my languages how science impacts our day-to-day lives, and that science is for everyone. 

Experiences and conversations with my family in Illinois and Mexico have sparked numerous research ideas, like understanding the variability of the midsummer drought in southwestern Mexico; analyzing the weather patterns associated with urban flooding in my hometown of Cicero, IL; and developing a Mesoamerica version of NCAR kilometer-scale climate simulations to facilitate orographic precipitation research in the complex topography of Mexico and Caribbean islands. My career has been enriched by mentoring and creating a smoother path for the next generation of Hispanic/Latinx scientists. I can’t wait to see what ideas they’ll explore.

Learn more about Dr. Morales here.

Photo at top: Dr. Annareli Morales. Photo credit: Kristen Sigg.

Trailblazer meteorologist Eugenia Kalnay (1942–2024)

Eugenia Kalnay two photos

We stand on the shoulders of gentle giants

By Anjuli S. Bamzai, PhD, AMS President

Last month, we lost a giant in the field of meteorology. Through the course of her illustrious career, Eugenia Kalnay pioneered not only the fundamental science and practical applications of numerical weather prediction, she also influenced many careers. Her scientific contributions and leadership led to improved forecasts, helping save lives and property across the globe and making U.S. weather and seasonal climate prediction world-class. 

Kalnay had deep ties with the AMS. In 1982, she became a Fellow of the AMS. She was elected to the AMS Council in 1995. In 2015, a named Symposium was held in her honor at the 95th AMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix. The list of awards she received from the AMS includes the following: Jule G. Charney Award (1995), Joanne Simpson Mentorship Award (2015), Honorary Member (2015), and the first ever Jagadish Shukla Earth System Predictability Prize (2024).

Kalnay receiving the Joanne Simpson Mentorship Award in 2015 from AMS President William Gail. (Photo credit: AMS)

Kalnay exemplified simple living and high thinking. She demonstrated how one can, through grit and determination, overcome unforeseen obstacles and achieve what one sets out for oneself. In 1966, having completed her undergraduate degree, she was working as a meteorology research assistant at the University of Buenos Aires, when a military coup occurred in Argentina. In its wake, mass resignations and disruptions on campus made it untenable for her to continue to work there. Through the timely support and intervention of Dean Rolando Garcia, she got an opportunity to pursue her studies in meteorology at MIT. Her graduate advisor was Jule G. Charney. 

The rest of her story will go down in the annals of meteorology.

In 1971 she became the first female PhD and, two years later, the first female professor in the MIT Department of Meteorology. She was a role model for other women that followed, including Paola Malanotte-Rizzoli and Inez Fung, pioneers in their own right. She later moved to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Laboratory for Atmospheres; in 1984, she became Head of the Global Modeling and Simulation Branch. From 1987 to 1997, she worked as director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Environmental Modeling Center at NOAA. 

Her efforts and leadership in data assimilation approaches at NCEP led to substantive improvements in weather forecast models. The data assimilation approaches she developed at NCEP, along with the “breeding method” she created with Zoltan Toth, helped improve weather forecasts, making a useful 10-day forecast possible. 

Kalnay spearheaded a major reanalysis project of 40+ years of global climate data there (and later, 50- and 60-year reanalyses), which became a keystone for climate science. The 1996 paper in BAMS describing the 40-year reanalysis project has, at last count, been cited a staggering 35,330 times, making it one of the most widely referenced articles in geosciences. According to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, “The reanalysis is certainly the most scientifically fertile dataset in climate science since its creation (and perhaps for all time).” 

The 50-year reanalysis data set was distributed as a CD-ROM at an AMS annual meeting. It was a precursor for other reanalysis datasets that followed, such as paleo reanalysis and climate of the 20th century.

<<The NCEP/NCAR 40-year Reanalysis Project paper was published in 1996 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

After retiring from federal service, Kalnay returned to academia and was appointed Robert E. Lowry Chair of the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. In 1999, she joined the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. She subsequently served as Distinguished University Professor and was an active researcher till the end.

In 2002 she published a book entitled Atmospheric Modeling, Data Assimilation and Predictability. It is now in its fifth edition, and has been translated into Chinese and Korean.

Left: Kalnay’s book, published in 2002. Center: Kalnay with Ron McPherson (left) and Louis Uccellini (right), both past AMS Presidents and former NCEP Directors, at the Symposium of the 50th Anniversary of Operational Numerical Weather Prediction, June 2004 (photo credit: NOAA NCEP). Right: Kalnay and two of her colleagues, Sumant Nigam and Zhanqing Li, were featured on the cover of the May 2004 issue of Science. The article highlighted foreign-born meteorologists from the University of Maryland, College Park’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science.

A 2010 interview in the WMO Bulletin gives us a glimpse into Kalnay’s passion for meteorology.  

“I’m lucky to be working in atmospheric sciences,” she said. “It’s a fascinating subject. Working in meteorology is like working in physics, but without the danger of anybody saying, ‘So why are you doing that? What is the use?’ What we do is incredibly useful, especially since it is not national or regional, but global.”

In the past decade or so, Kalnay had been working on the leading-edge topic of climate change and sustainability, recognizing, as she and her colleagues wrote in a 2023 paper, that “the Earth is a very large and complex system that consists of human and natural components interacting bidirectionally with each other.” She and her team — which included Safa Mote and Jorge Rivas, Kalnay’s son — were extending concepts from weather forecasting, such as uncertainty, high sensitivity, and error propagation, to the coupled human-Earth system, and tackling its dynamic interactions.

Earth Day 2022: Safa Mote, Eugenia Kalnay, and Anjuli Bamzai. (Photo credit: Anjuli Bamzai)

Eugenia Kalnay was not only an active scientist who published her results in top-notch journals, she also engaged in practical applications of the science and promoted the kind of international collaborations that continue to advance atmospheric science for the benefit of global communities and economies. She was a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea and Argentine Academy of Physical Sciences, and 2009 winner of the International Meteorological Organization (IMO) Prize. 

Eugenia inspired the next generation of scientists in the field, across many countries. She always maintained her academic connections to Argentina, including teaching courses and supervising research theses at the University of Buenos Aires, which granted her an honorary doctorate. She also has a women’s soccer team there named after her: Eugenia Kalnay FC!

Eugenia Kalnay was a major influence in Argentina as well as globally. Left: Kalnay (front row, second from right) with her mentor, Rolando Garcia (front row, far right) and her mentee, eminent atmospheric scientist Carolina Vera (center) in 2003, when Eugenia was designated member of the Argentina Academy of Exact and Natural Sciences. Top right: Kalnay with members of the Eugenia Kalnay football team. Bottom right: The full Eugenia Kalnay FC team. (Photo credit: Carolina Vera)

She was a beloved mentor, who was concerned not only with science but also nurturing people’s promise, collectively and individually—including advancing women in the field. An interview with the Inter-American Network of Academies of Sciences showcases some of the wisdom she left for us:

Of course, women should be in science!  Why would one even think of wasting the brains of half of the scientifically inclined population?

The most important advice is to work on what you like to do, without worrying about money or recognition, which will come if you put passion in your work.

Learn to speak clearly, briefly and forcefully, and don’t allow others to interrupt you!

She was a kind a generous soul, and her unstinting generosity in providing advice, encouragement, leadership and inspiration will be missed. Her enduring legacy will be a beacon of light for generations to follow.

When I posted the sad news of her passing on the AMS Open Forum, there was an outpouring of condolences from every quarter of the globe. 

Even as we grieve our loss, we celebrate her tremendous contributions and leadership.

Photos at top of post: Left: Eugenia Kalnay (photo credit: John Consoli, University of Maryland). Right: Kalnay and her son Jorge Rivas at the 2024 AMS Awards ceremony, where she received the Jagadish Shukla Earth System Predictability Prize (photo credit: AMS).

Anjuli is grateful to Katherine ‘Katie’ Pflaumer for providing useful edits.