A start of something new
Today is the beginning of a new journey for me, and hopefully it will be a journey many of you will accompany me on. For the first time in 35 years, I am waking up Saturday morning not an employee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) after 25 years of being a meteorologist for the National Weather Service (NWS) and then most recently a decade at the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL, part of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research). My new employment status was my choice – I am now retired – but it would be fair to say that my decision to start a new phase in life was significantly influenced by current happenings in the federal government that you have probably heard or read about. I will probably have more to say about that in future posts – but for now I want to focus on this Balanced Weather substack and what I hope it will be.
My 35 year career has – hopefully, anyway – been focused on the general goal of reducing the negative impacts of natural hazards on people and society. Most of my National Weather Service career was spent at the office in Jackson, MS, the last 13 years as the meteorologist-in-charge (MIC). The region served by that office is one of the most vulnerable to severe weather impacts – both from a physical hazard perspective and from a socioeconomic perspective – in the country. So as MIC there, I worked closely with emergency management officials and many other entities to help guide the region through some of the most impactful natural disasters of recent memory: Hurricane Katrina, the 2011 April 27 “superoutbreak” of tornadoes, the 2011 Mississippi River floods, to name just a few.
That experience ingrained in me the importance of combining the best physical science tools with clear, concise communication guided by social science to build and support societal partnerships that can prepare and assist communities ahead of, during and after natural disasters. My passion for this work led me to go back to school and get a master’s degree in emergency/disaster management from Millersville University in 2014 – and eventually take a new career track. In that new position at NSSL starting in 2015, I became a leader for the lab’s interdisciplinary physical and social science research focused on the overall goal I outlined above, and this is what I have spent most of the last decade working on.
While my career at NOAA has ended, my passion for this work has not, and I deeply believe that a significant need in society today is for reasoned, rational and scientific perspective on critical topics like weather and climate. I hope that with my 35 years of immersion in this space that I can provide that sort of unique perspective through this Balanced Weather substack. My mission here is to provide intelligence and information to help people:
Be aware of potential impactful weather, water and climate events and have the information needed to make important decisions and take proactive measures to be better prepared
Comprehend the science that helps us understand and predict the atmosphere and climate
Be informed about issues that could affect our capacity to understand, predict and respond to weather events and climate change
The main medium through which Balanced Weather will communicate to our community of followers will be through a free newsletter posted most days, discussing upcoming weather patterns and threats as well as any relevant updates on weather/climate research and news. But I particularly want to use the innovative communication tools that today’s technology and Substack provides to help people better understand the complexity of meteorology and our atmosphere, and the incredible people and science that support what has become a ubiquitous and (in my opinion) underappreciated aspect of our modern society: accurate weather forecasts and warnings. So for those folks who have a deeper interest in these topics and are willing to pay a small monthly or annual fee to support this work, I will be providing extras like live Substack chats before and during significant weather events, interviews with weather and climate scientists, and a community where you can ask questions about weather events and topics.
If this sounds like something of interest, please click subscribe and try it out. It’s a new experience for me, so there will probably be some bumps along the way, but hopefully we can keep those to a minimum and maximize the learning and information. My retirement and Balanced Weather are starting out with extremely active weather in full swing, so I will be making separate posts about that – and for those interested, on Saturday we will be hosting live Substack chats about the ongoing weather events. Since this will be my first time using Substack chat, it will be a bit of a training run so it will be free to all. More info to come in later posts.
And again, welcome to Balanced Weather!
Balanced Weather 
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