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Category: Science

  • DHS pauses cuts to FEMA as massive winter storm barrels in

    DHS pauses cuts to FEMA as massive winter storm barrels in

    The Department of Homeland Security has paused terminations of employees working on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster response as it ramps up preparations for a massive and life-threatening winter storm that will pummel half the country this weekend.

    Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that the agency planned to terminate disaster response and recovery workers in waves. On New Year’s Eve, agency officials eliminated about 65 positions that were part of FEMA’s largest workforce, known as the Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) — staffers who are among the first on the ground after a disaster and often stick around for years to help communities recover.

    But on Thursday night, DHS’s head of human resources sent an email notifying teams that “just a few minutes ago,” FEMA headquarters decided the agency would halt their process of non-renewing dozens of federally funded employees. These roles, hired by FEMA for multiyear terms under the Stafford Act using the disaster relief fund, have been up for renewal on a rolling basis.

    Earlier that day, about 30 disaster workers received notices that their jobs would not be renewed. The pause then prompted human resources staff to backtrack, notifying those same workers that they still had jobs, according to the email and an official familiar with the process. Like others interviewed for this story, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

    “I didn’t even know what was happening until it happened,” the official said, adding that as human resources initially emailed people informing them that their jobs would not be renewed, senior leaders were learning that FEMA was pausing terminations.

    In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that the agency regularly changes staffing levels for its disaster response and recovery efforts.

    “The CORE program consists of term-limited positions that are designed to FLUCTUATE based on disaster activity, operational NEED, and available funding,” the department said in its statement, which included text in all-caps.

    “FEMA’s National Response Coordination Center has been activated in response to a historic winter storm, in line with this mission FEMA is following standard protocol to ensure mission functions are being met,” it added.

    Officials would not comment on how long the pause would last.

    While states and local authorities handle most of their preparation and response to winter storms, FEMA will often deliver resources ahead of time, including generators and personnel if the potential for disaster seems high. Stafford Act employees, such as CORE members, will deploy to a state if they request an emergency or disaster declaration and the president approves it.

    The sudden shift in staffing direction has caught officials across the agency by surprise, six officials said. In recent weeks, their teams were told to prepare to lose a substantial number of people over the next few months.

    Since December, DHS has terminated more than 100 people across the agency who FEMA employs under the Stafford Act.

    Some were informed on New Year’s Eve; others were given only a day or two to turn in their equipment; and still more were cut after their supervisors sent detailed memos explaining why their roles remained vital to FEMA’s mission. The agency also lost veteran employees who oversaw finances for Hurricane Helene recovery, as well as civil engineers who assist states with mitigation and rebuilding roadways, bridges and schools. Some offices in the Midwest have lost experienced managers who typically help lead operations during emergencies and big disasters.

    On Wednesday, FEMA cut nearly 85 local hires from several regions, including a handful who were still working on Hurricane Helene recovery projects in North Carolina — a state now readying itself for potential power outages — according to two people with knowledge of the situation. FEMA’s call center in Puerto Rico lost many of their local hires Wednesday as well, one FEMA official said. If multiple states are hit hard enough and ask the president for federal assistance, those workers could have helped out, two officials said.

    The same day the department halted the terminations, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem visited the agency’s headquarters to help guide national coordination and preparation for the sweeping storm. Noem, whose department oversees FEMA, also hosted a call Thursday morning with governors from 21 states that are bracing for dangerous, chilling weather. She assured them that DHS and FEMA will support them.

    “We can pre-deploy any needs that you may have, as far as generators or supplies to different parts of your state if you think you have a weakness in some area that’s going to be hit pretty hard,” Noem told the governors, reiterating that “if there is certain responses or requests specific to this event, feel free to reach out and use that contact information, and we’ll do all that we can to be helpful.”

    During the call, Karen Evans, FEMA’s agency’s interim administrator, and Gregg Phillips, who is now overseeing the Office of Response and Recovery, also offered their personal cell phone numbers in case any governor needs to get in touch with them immediately.

    Noem has instructed FEMA to be aggressive in preparing for the heavy snow and ice forecast to blanket a large portion of the United States and has promised a rapid and well-coordinated response, according to an official with knowledge of the situation. FEMA has delivered tens of thousands of meals and liters of water to various states, and it has positioned drivers who shuttle supplies outside distribution centers from Louisiana up to Pennsylvania.

    The decision to pause the terminations also coincides with the House’s approval Thursday of a spending bill that would fund FEMA’s disaster relief fund and help the agency “maintain staffing levels, including a reservist workforce and its Cadre of Response/Recovery Employees, necessary to fulfill the missions required under” federal law.

    Ahead of the storm, 10 officials from different parts of the agency who spoke to the Post said they were nervous about their ability to properly respond, given how their ranks have thinned over the past year, with the agency losing about 20% of its staff.

    Noem, who has exercised strict oversight over FEMA since taking over DHS, has repeatedly expressed a desire to shrink or eliminate the agency. The Post reported that she previously recommended cutting agency staffing by about half.

    In a previous statement, FEMA spokesperson Daniel Llargués said the agency had “not issued and is not implementing a percentage-based workforce reduction.”

    Employees in CORE roles are typically renewed every two to four years. When the end of an employee’s contracted term approaches, their supervisors typically seek approval to renew those roles. Most positions are usually reinstated, according to four current and former FEMA officials, in part because recovery work is long and complex.

    But in recent weeks, DHS’s process for renewing these temporary roles has changed frequently, according to officials with knowledge of the situation. Last week, supervisors in each region had to write memos justifying every role coming up for renewal this year, which would then be sent to FEMA’s temporary top official and then to Noem, according to two people familiar with the process. Guidance then shifted earlier this week. In a memo from Thursday, obtained by the Post, FEMA officials said that DHS will be making the calls without collecting justifications, and that “only extensions approved by DHS will be processed and they will be limited to 90 days.”

    One CORE employee said DHS suddenly cut her job without warning after her manager had submitted a memo urging to keep her on. Because some firings have been abrupt, some were not able to transition their work, she said.

    “And to be clear, I think most of us expected there to be staffing cuts this year,” the person said. “Just not in the bulldozer approach that didn’t take into account your job or performance.”

  • Snow, perhaps more than a foot, is all but certain this weekend for Philly

    Snow, perhaps more than a foot, is all but certain this weekend for Philly

    Based on what the computers and their human interpreters are saying, a key question this weekend will be whether measuring the snow in the Philly region will require a ruler or a yardstick.

    This no doubt will be a moving target, but on Friday morning, the National Weather Service in Mount Holly was seeing eight to 14 inches for Philly, said meteorologist Alex Staarmann. Several inches were possible even at the Jersey Shore.

    For Philly, that would be the first double-digit snowfall in 10 years.

    A wild card would be a potentially unpleasant atmospheric parfait that would add ice to the mix on Sunday, and computer models Friday were suggesting that mixing was likely near I-95 and in Delaware and South Jersey. However, the weather service expects that to yield to all snow Sunday night.

    While this is all quite a complicated meteorological setup, in essence Arctic air is pressing southward and it is going to interact with an impressively juicy storm to the south.

    “Having the Arctic front come through before the onset of wintry precipitation, that’s really concerning,” said Ray Kruzdlo, the staff hydrologist in the weather service office, where “it’s all hands on deck.”

    Below-zero windchills are expected Saturday morning, prompting a cold-weather advisory, and temperatures in Philly may stay below freezing the rest of the month.

    What time will the snow start and end?

    The timing and duration of precipitation aren’t among the strong suits of computer models.

    The weather service’s winter storm watch, which covers the entire region, all of Delaware, and most of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, is in effect from 7 p.m. Saturday until 1 p.m. Monday.

    The daytime Saturday “looks fine if you have to get out,” said Tom Kines, senior meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc.

    The weather service is listing the likeliest starting time as the early morning hours of Sunday, with snow likely into the early morning hours of Monday.

    Sunday is going to be one of the colder days of the winter with temperatures in the teens and lower 20s. The weather service introduces the possibility of freezing rain and sleet by 1 p.m., with a forecast temperature of 19 degrees.

    The promise, peril, and whimsy of a potential double-digit snowfall in Philly

    Wait, it can rain when it’s 19 degrees?

    Yes, it can rain when it’s below 20 degrees at the surface, and precipitation doesn’t get much more dangerous.

    Snow and sleet, liquid that freezes on the way down, can at least provide traction on the roads. Rain that freezes on contact becomes an ice sheet. Also, when freezing rain accumulates on fallen snow it can bring down trees and power lines.

    Peco has heard the storm rumors (who hasn’t?) and will have crews on call through the weekend, said spokesperson Candace Womack.

    The threat of ice is related to the possibility of warm layers of air, borne on onshore winds from the ocean, at levels of the atmosphere where precipitation is formed.

    That could well happen Sunday as the coastal storm intensifies, said Kruzdlo, and winds build from the Northeast, perhaps gusting past 20 mph. Any rain or sleet would encounter very cold air at the surface, locked and dammed in place by the Appalachian Mountains.

    “That’s the complexity of living where we are so close to the ocean,” Kruzdlo said. “We have tens of thousands of observations at the surface,” he added, but data from the upper atmosphere is wanting, adding challenges to forecasting changeovers.

    Along the I-95 corridor, storms of purely snow are the exceptions, Kruzdlo said.

    What are chances that the storm is a bust?

    In the chess matches between science and the nonlinear chaos of the atmosphere, chaos has been known to win.

    One of the more notable busts occurred in January 2015 when forecasts called for an I-95 East Coast snowstorm so ferocious that the mayor of New York imposed a curfew.

    Philly was supposed to get a foot or more, and ended up with an inch or two. That prompted the head of the Mount Holly weather service office to issue a public apology.

    His boss at the time, weather service head Louis Uccellini, said no apology was necessary: Science has its limits. Busts have been known to happen in the battle of science against nonlinear.

    This time around, meteorologists are all but certain something “impactful” is going to happen.

    Said Kruzdlo, the slim chance of this storm “not being significant is leaving us.”

  • A major winter storm is looking inevitable for Philly, with the snow expected to stick around

    A major winter storm is looking inevitable for Philly, with the snow expected to stick around

    The details are likely to remain elusive well into the weekend, but on Wednesday evidence was accumulating that the Philadelphia region could become a winter wonderland for the remainder of January.

    “We’re definitely going to get some snow,” said Alex Staarmann, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, which probably won’t make a first accumulation guess until Thursday afternoon. Snow could begin as early as Saturday night and continue into Monday.

    The weather service Thursday posted a winter-storm watch for the entire region — for all of Delaware and most of Pennsylvania and New Jersey — in effect from 7 p.m. Saturday until 1 p.m. Monday.

    At the weather office, “It’s all hands on deck,” said agency hydrologist Ray Kruzdlo Thursday. The “outside chance” that the region would be spared a major storm “is leaving us.”

    AccuWeather Inc. is calling for 6 to 10 inches for Philly, very much subject to change, said senior meteorologist Bob Larsen.

    Several inches of snow would be all but certain, the weather service said. Philadelphia could have a 75% chance of a foot or more, based on analysis of a blend of computer models, and a 50-50 shot of 18 inches or more. However, the individual models are having their usual squabbles, with the American being the snowiest.

    In any event, Staarmann said: “It could be a significant storm for most of the region.”

    And that applies to the rest of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. AccuWeather Inc. estimated that snow and ice during the weekend could affect half the nation’s population.

    Said Stephen Morgan, a meteorologist with Fox Weather: “It’s one of the most sprawling systems we’ve seen in several years.”

    Predictably, computer models have been using the map as a Ouija board, moving around the zones of the expected heaviest snows.

    Earlier in the week, it appeared that the region would be near the northern edge of the snowfall; on Wednesday, however, the models bumped the snow north, increasing the chances that snow could mix with sleet and freezing rain in Delaware and South Jersey.

    The snow could mix with sleet at the height of the storm even in the Philly region, the weather service said. That would hold down accumulations: Sleet is slow to accumulate. Conversely, since it is pure ice, it is slower to melt.

    Should any rain get mixed in, it would freeze on contact: The upper air may be warmer, but temperatures at the surface are forecast to be mostly in the teens Sunday.

    The amounts of snow and mixing would depend on the track of a storm that is forecast to develop off the Texas Gulf Coast and track through the Tennessee Valley and off the Mid-Atlantic coast on Sunday. That track ultimately will be determined by other moving parts in the atmosphere.

    As the storm intensifies, its onshore winds would import warmer air into the upper atmosphere, changing the snow to sleet and/or freezing rain, but the surface layers would remain quite cold, Larsen said.

    Despite the potential mixing, it is at least possible that Philly will get its first double-digit snowfall since Jan. 22, 2018, said Paul Dorian, a meteorologist with Arcfield Weather, based in Valley Forge.

    In the short term, Thursday may be a day to savor. It’s heading into the mid-40s, with nothing falling from the skies. The cold begins to filter in Friday, and highs will be in the teens Saturday.

    After the precipitation shuts off Sunday night or Monday, whatever has fallen won’t be in a hurry to disappear, Staarmann said.

    Temperatures might not get above freezing for several days after the snow stops, he said. Wind chills are expected to be in the single digits Monday morning, and below zero Tuesday.

    “This overall very cold weather pattern is likely to continue into next weekend, potentially beyond,” the weather service said.

    “The next couple of weeks will feature some of the worst weather winter has to offer,” Dorian said.

    Said Fox’s Morgan: “The overall pattern in the Northeast seems to be locked in to a colder than average at least to Groundhog Day.”

    Punxsutawney Phil might want a “do not disturb” sign this year outside his burrow.

  • A major snowstorm is looking more likely this weekend for Philly, and maybe a white week

    A major snowstorm is looking more likely this weekend for Philly, and maybe a white week

    Computer models continue to insist with a rather uncharacteristic certainty that the Philadelphia region and much of the Mid-Atlantic can expect a significant snowstorm during the weekend.

    Now, when have they ever been wrong?

    On Wednesday, models were in general agreement that Philly had a high likelihood of a snowfall of at least 6 inches, the National Weather Service said, with the potential for substantially more. It listed Sunday’s snow probability at 80%, unusually high for an event at least four days away.

    Whatever does or does not happen from here, the likes of Acme, Giant, Wegmans, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s thank you.

    “All the tools we have are starting to point toward something is going to happen,” said Mike Lee, a lead meteorologist at the weather service office in Mount Holly.

    “We know it’s going to get more people uneasy, but we want people to be aware.”

    It’s too early to make a guess on snow totals, his colleague, Alex Staarmann said.

    “We’re definitely going to get some snow. It could be a significant storm for most of the region. That’s all we can say at this point.”

    He added that it wouldn’t melt quickly with temperatures remaining below freezing for several days. Wind chills Monday night could fall below zero, he said.

    As for the chances that snow will snub the region this weekend (it’s been known to happen), Bob Oravec, lead forecaster with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center, said that’s highly unlikely. “Given the very good agreement in the numerical models, this has a very low chance of being a bust overall.”

    Early estimates for snow amounts vary from the prodigious to the prosaic.

    The big commercial services, AccuWeather Inc. and the Weather Channel, also are on board. In fact, although the storm remains a virtual concept, the Weather Channel already has affixed a name to it.

    When might snow arrive in the Philly area?

    Forecasters said the snow could begin as early as late Saturday, and continue into Monday.

    The snow would spread south to north.

    In the early going, it was uncertain which areas would receive the very heftiest amounts.

    The snow machine would be set off by dry polar air interacting with copious moisture to the south, which is likely to encounter resistance to the north.

    The big snows would occur between that dry wall to the north and a wall of ice and rain to the south, said Matt Benz, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather.

    Whatever does fall in Philly likely would all snow, but it’s possible sleet could mix in south of the city.

    After temperatures moderate the next two days and climb into the mid-40s Thursday, the cold air is expected to pour into the region Friday. High temperatures Saturday through Monday may struggle to get past 20, with or without a snow cover.

    Is it possible that Philly will be flakeless?

    Of course.

    Snow forecast busts are part of the cost of doing winter business in the Philly region.

    Some of the key west-to-east moving features that will power the system have not yet made landfall, and thus have not been observed by land-based instruments.

    One piece of energy is over the Pacific, and another somewhere over Siberia, Benz said.

    “The pieces just aren’t moving that quickly,” he said. They may not make landfall over North America until Thursday, he added, and that could be present real issues for the machines and their human interpreters.

    Said Oravec: “Historically, when these features can better be identified by the weather balloon network across North America, the models forecasts improve and converge on a common solution.”

    Benz said it may take until Friday for computers to sort it all out with newly ingested data.

    Recall that the snow forecasts last weekend bedeviled forecasters on both Saturday and Sunday.

    Oravec said computer models are marvels and “do a great job at identifying large-scale patterns that are conducive for major winter storms.”

    But “some of the smaller details that can enhance the impacts are harder to model.”

    Perhaps the most important data point to consider: The prospective first flakes may not be in evidence until the very beginning of next week.

  • Researchers find Antarctic penguin breeding is heating up sooner, and that’s a problem

    Researchers find Antarctic penguin breeding is heating up sooner, and that’s a problem

    WASHINGTON — Warming temperatures are forcing Antarctic penguins to breed earlier and that’s a big problem for two of the cute tuxedoed species that face extinction by the end of the century, a study said.

    With temperatures in the breeding ground increasing 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) from 2012 to 2022, three different penguin species are beginning their reproductive process about two weeks earlier than the decade before, according to a study in Tuesday’s Journal of Animal Ecology. And that sets up potential food problems for young chicks.

    “Penguins are changing the time at which they’re breeding at a record speed, faster than any other vertebrate,” said lead author Ignacio Juarez Martinez, a biologist at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. “And this is important because the time at which you breed needs to coincide with the time with most resources in the environment and this is mostly food for your chicks so they have enough to grow.’’

    For some perspective, scientists have studied changes in the life cycle of great tits, a European bird. They found a similar two-week change, but that took 75 years as opposed to just 10 years for these three penguin species, said study co-author Fiona Suttle, another Oxford biologist.

    Researchers used remote control cameras to photograph penguins breeding in dozens of colonies from 2011 to 2021. They say it was the fastest shift in timing of life cycles for any backboned animals that they have seen. The three species are all brush-tailed, so named because their tails drag on the ice: the cartoon-eye Adelie, the black-striped chinstrap and the fast-swimming gentoo.

    Warming creates penguin winners, losers

    Suttle said climate change is creating winners and losers among these three penguin species and it happens at a time in the penguin life cycle where food and the competition for it are critical in survival.

    The Adelie and chinstrap penguins are specialists, eating mainly krill. The gentoo have a more varied diet. They used to breed at different times, so there were no overlaps and no competition. But the gentoos’ breeding has moved earlier faster than the other two species and now there’s overlap. That’s a problem because gentoos, which don’t migrate as far as the other two species, are more aggressive in finding food and establishing nesting areas, Martinez and Suttle said.

    Suttle said she has gone back in October and November to the same colony areas where she used to see Adelies in previous years only to find their nests replaced by gentoos. And the data backs up the changes her eyes saw, she said.

    “Chinstraps are declining globally,” Martinez said. “Models show that they might get extinct before the end of the century at this rate. Adelies are doing very poorly in the Antarctic Peninsula and it’s very likely that they go extinct from the Antarctic Peninsula before the end of the century.”

    Early bird dining causes problems

    Martinez theorized that the warming western Antarctic — the second-fasting heating place on Earth behind only the Arctic North Atlantic — means less sea ice. Less sea ice means more spores coming out earlier in the Antarctic spring and then “you have this incredible bloom of phytoplankton,” which is the basis of the food chain that eventually leads to penguins, he said. And it’s happening earlier each year.

    Not only do the chinstraps and Adelies have more competition for food from gentoos because of the warming and changes in plankton and krill, but the changes have brought more commercial fishing that comes earlier and that further shortens the supply for the penguins, Suttle said.

    This shift in breeding timing “is an interesting signal of change and now it’s important to continuing observing these penguin populations to see if these changes have negative impacts on their populations,” said Michelle LaRue, a professor of Antarctic marine science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. She was not part of the Oxford study.

    People’s penguin love helps science

    With millions of photos — taken every hour by 77 cameras for 10 years — scientists enlisted everyday people to help tag breeding activity using the Penguin Watch website.

    “We’ve had over 9 million of our images annotated via Penguin Watch,” Suttle said. “A lot of that does come down to the fact that people just love penguins so much. They’re very cute. They’re on all the Christmas cards. People say, ‘Oh, they look like little waiters in tuxedos.’”

    “The Adelies, I think their personality goes along with it as well,” Suttle said, saying there’s “perhaps a kind of cheekiness about them — and this very cartoonlike eye that does look like it’s just been drawn on.”

  • It may feel like zero in Philly this week, and the ‘wind chill’ has Pennsylvania roots

    It may feel like zero in Philly this week, and the ‘wind chill’ has Pennsylvania roots

    The region evidently is about to migrate from the refrigerator to the freezer this week, with wind-chill levels possibly approaching zero as temperatures fall to the teens and a brisk west wind adds sting.

    “Wind chill” has been a staple of National Weather Service forecasts and media weather reports since 1973.

    (Commercial services, such as AccuWeather Inc., now have their own variants.)

    At different times it has been a subject of contention, confusion, derision, and revision; its popularity, however, endures.

    In terms of alerting the public to potential health hazards, “I think it’s useful,” said Michael DeAngelis, vice chair of emergency medicine at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine.

    Said Harvey V. Lankford, a retired physician and writer who has done a deeper dive into wind chill than most humans: “It’s a yardstick.

    “The public loves it.”

    But where do those numbers come from, and do they tell us how we really feel?

    The birth of ‘wind chill’

    Gentoo penguins walk at Neko Harbour in Antarctica, Saturday, Nov. 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

    Wind chill is a measure of heat loss from the body from the combination of temperature and wind.

    What we know about its effects has a lot to do with former Eagle Scout Paul Siple, the pride of Erie’s Central High School.

    He pursued his quest while accompanying Admiral Richard Byrd on his legendary expeditions to that icy forbidden planet known as Antarctica, where the wind stings “like a knife drawn across the face,” as one of his associates put it. At age 19, Siple had won a highly publicized national competition to join Byrd.

    Siple minted the term wind chill in his 565-page unpublished doctoral dissertation, a copy of which Lankford obtained from Clark University, in Worcester, Mass.

    On a later expedition, Siple, assisted by geologist Charles Passel, conducted experiments measuring how long it took to freeze a container of water under a variety of temperature and wind conditions. Winds obviously accelerated the freezing process.

    Using that data they estimated heat loss from human skin, publishing their findings in a landmark 1945 paper.

    But Lankford said Siple got remarkable results in his more primitive earlier research, which included estimating frostbite thresholds, using a relatively simple formula involving wind speeds and temperatures.

    Siple’s work would become the basis for the wind chill factor that the weather service massaged and began sharing publicly in 1973.

    Frostbite and the wind chill revision

    The wind chill calculations underwent a significant revision a quarter century ago.

    U.S. and Canadian scientists during the 1990s used human subjects to upgrade the index, including establishing new frostbite thresholds.

    Twelve subjects, with sensors inside their cheeks and their faces bare, were subjected to temperatures ranging from 32 to 58 below at three different wind speeds.

    They were monitored for signs of “frostnip,” which precedes frostbite by about a minute.

    For the record, the researchers found that with wind chills of 40 below, frostnip occurs within 15 minutes.

    The weather service said the revised index profited from “advances in science, technology and computer modeling.”

    Yet Siple obviously had been on to something decades earlier, Lankford said.

    In a paper published in 2021 in the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine, Lankford and coauthor Leslie R. Fox wrote that some of the modern findings on frostbite thresholds were remarkably similar to what appeared in Siple’s dissertation.

    Lankford said they were not surprised by the similarities: “We were stunned.”

    Staying safe in the cold

    Aside from frostnip and frostbite potential, exposure to frigid temperatures and strong winds poses a variety of other health hazards, DeAngelis said.

    Those conditions can seriously exacerbate certain lung problems.

    For the healthy, he recommends proceeding with caution while exercising. Sweating in the cold — it does happen, just ask runners and hikers — can increase the risk of hypothermia.

    Plus, your brain, heart, kidneys, and other internal organs will be diverting blood flow from muscles and extremities, and that could slow recovery from exertion.

    Or you could just put off that run or bike workout until Thursday, when it may go up to 40 degrees.

  • Snow is expected during the weekend in Philly, but how much is up in the air

    Snow is expected during the weekend in Philly, but how much is up in the air

    Some snow is possible in the Philly region during the holiday weekend, but about the only thing certain is that schools will be closed until Tuesday.

    Snow — not a whole lot of it — is expected Saturday morning, and possibly again during the day Sunday.

    “Definitely something,” said Ray Martin, a lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service Office in Mount Holly, “maybe not a lot of something.”

    In short, he added, expect a “100% chance of forecast uncertainty.”

    How much for Philly?

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    Some snow is expected in the early morning hours of Saturday, said Dan Pydynowski, senior meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc., and “sidewalks and streets could be slick for a time” in the Philly region.

    However, temperatures in the afternoon are expected to approach 40 degrees and that should melt any snow. If the precipitation lingers, it likely would turn to rain.

    That snow would be associated with a system from the west, and more significant amounts are expected well north and west of Philly.

    On Sunday when it will be colder, the source would be a coastal storm that has been befuddling computer models the last three days. On Wednesday, the U.S. model was seeing a significant snowstorm for the I-95 corridor. On Thursday, it said never mind and fell in line with other guidance that kept the storm offshore.

    On Friday, models were bringing the storm closer to the coast, but the model consensus was that it would be more of threat at the Shore and perhaps throw back a paltry amount to the immediate Philly region.

    “On the other hand, a slight shift … in the track could bring 1-2 inches into the urban corridor,” the weather service said in its afternoon discussion.

    Said Martin, “It’s always tricky with these offshore lows. It’s also possible that both systems pass us and we get basically nothing.”

    Far more certain is a rather big chill

    A Philadelphia firefighter spreads salt to control icing at a fire scene on Friday.

    That the region was about to experience its coldest weather of the season to date was all but certain.

    High temperatures on Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, probably won’t get out of the 30s, and no higher than the mid 20s Tuesday and Wednesday, forecasters say.

    Overnight lows are due to tumble into the teens, with wind chills approaching zero early Wednesday.

    No more precipitation is forecast at least through Thursday, but with odds favoring continued below-normal temperatures through Jan. 29 and above-normal precipitation, it should be a robust period for virtual snow threats, if not actual snow.

    “Even if nothing really happens this weekend,” said Martin, “there’s always next weekend.”

    Pydynowski said that “some signs” point to a snowfall “late next week or next weekend.”

    But one uncertainty at a time.

  • Winter is about to return in Philly. Will snow join the party?

    Winter is about to return in Philly. Will snow join the party?

    As it approaches halftime, the meteorological winter around here so far has been about as inconsistent as the Philadelphia Eagles’ offense, but it is about to get decidedly colder, if not snowier.

    Temperatures on Thursday are due to hover around freezing with a brisk westerly wind gusting up to 30 mph (sympathies to all bikers and runners and those who are navigating those Center City wind tunnels), and then drop into the 20s after sunset with windchills in the teens.

    Then, after a modest warmup Friday and Saturday, the forecast turns decidedly colder and potentially more intriguing, as computer models have been going back and forth on snow potential for the Philly region.

    Philly’s coldest stretch of the winter so far to begin Sunday

    Readings are expected to warm into the 40s on Saturday, but then drop off dramatically during the holiday weekend and may not reach freezing again until Thursday.

    They may not get out of the 20s on Tuesday — when wind chills could fall to 0 in Philly — and Wednesday, with overnight lows in the teens.

    This is called January.

    Will the cold lock in a snow cover?

    A few alarm bells went off Wednesday afternoon when the main U.S. computer model suggested potential major snowstorms along the coast all the way to the I-95 corridor on Sunday.

    However, other computer guidance wasn’t buying it, nor were forecasters. The computer food fight continued Thursday.

    The U.S. model, said Paul Pastelok, longtime seasonal forecast specialist with AccuWeather Inc., “goes wacky all the time.” Maybe not all the time, but a subsequent run of the European model kept the storm offshore.

    “We’re kind of in a waiting game,” said Pastelok.

    Opined the National Weather Service Office in Mount Holly in its afternoon forecast discussion, the potential system has “high-end potential but also could end up being nothing.”

    In other words, situation normal.

    The winter so far in Philly and United States

    Oddly, the raw stats for the first half of the meteorological winter — that’s the Dec. 1-Feb. 28 period — are not too far from normal for snowfall and temperature.

    But that’s the result of quite a cold start to an eventful December, followed by a benign and uneventful January around here.

    December temperatures finished at 3.6 degrees below normal at Philadelphia International Airport. And in the first two weeks of 2026, they were 3.6 degrees above normal. Snowfall in December was about an inch above average, but with a paltry 0.3 inches so far this month, the 4.8 total is very close to where it should be.

    The early season coolness in Philly and much of the rest of the East was a surprise, said Owen Shieh, warning coordination meteorologist with NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center, in College Park, Md. The West, conversely, was quite warm.

    The contrasts were the result of “pattern persistence,” said Tony Fracasso, a weather center meteorologist.

    In the East, “This winter started quite strong,” he added, compared with recent winters. “It was not record cold,” but, “it sure felt cold for us.”

    What’s ahead the rest of the winter of 2025-26

    That likely will be the case early next week, and NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center has chances favoring below normal temperatures and above-normal precipitation in the Jan. 22-28 period.

    Pastelok said that upper-air patterns are aligning in such a way that favors importing cold air from northwestern Canada.

    The Climate Center’s Laura Ciasto said she does not see a major invasion of the polar vortex in the next few weeks. The vortex circles the Arctic, imprisoning the planet’s coldest air. But on occasion, the winds weaken, the freezer opens, and the contents spill southward.

    She said the vortex winds are slightly weaker than normal but are expected to strengthen.

    It is possible that lobes of the vortex may stretch on occasion, resulting in short-lived periods of cold in the Northeast, said Judah Cohen, research scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    A period to watch would be the first week in February, when a significant disruption of the vortex is possible, Pastelok said.

    A sudden stratospheric warming in the high atmosphere in the Arctic, which can lead to cold outbreaks in the contiguous United States “is not out of the question” late in the winter, Ciasto said.

    Philadelphia’s peak snow season typically occurs in late January through mid-February.

    Of the 10 biggest snowfalls in the city’s history, only three have occurred before Jan 22.

  • Kenneth W. Ford, hydrogen bomb physicist, educator, and author, has died at 99

    Kenneth W. Ford, hydrogen bomb physicist, educator, and author, has died at 99

    Kenneth W. Ford, 99, of Gwynedd, Montgomery County, theoretical physicist who helped develop the hydrogen bomb in 1952, university president, college professor, executive director, award-winning author, and Navy veteran, died Friday, Dec. 5, of pneumonia at Foulkeways at Gwynedd retirement community.

    Dr. Ford was a 24-year-old physics graduate student at Princeton University in 1950 when he was recruited by a colleague to help other scientists covertly build a hydrogen bomb. “I was told if we don’t do it, the Soviet Union will,” Dr. Ford told The Inquirer in 2023, “and the world will become a much more dangerous place.”

    So he spent one year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and another back at Princeton, creating calculations on the burning of the fuel that ignited the bomb and theorizing about nuclear fission and fusion. The H-bomb was tested in 1952.

    Dr. Ford’s expertise was in nuclear structure and particle and mathematical physics. He and Albert Einstein attended the same lecture when he was young, and he knew Robert Oppenheimer, Fredrick Reines, John Wheeler, and dozens of other accomplished scientists and professors over his long career.

    He came to Philadelphia from the University System of Maryland in 1983 to be president of a startup biotech firm. He joined the American Physical Society as an education officer in 1986 and was named executive director of the American Institute of Physics in 1987.

    “He always seemed to be the head of something,” his son Jason said.

    He retired from the AIP in 1993 but kept busy as a consultant for the California-based Packard Foundation and physics teacher at Germantown Academy and Germantown Friends School. Michael Moloney, current chief executive of the AIP, praised Dr. Ford’s “steady and transformative leadership” in a tribute. He said: “His career in research, education, and global scientific collaboration puts him among the giants.”

    As president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology from 1975 to 1982, Dr. Ford oversaw improvements in the school’s enrollment, faculty, budget, and facilities. He “was an accomplished researcher, scholar and teacher,” Michael Jackson, interim president of New Mexico Tech, said in a tribute, “a techie through and through.”

    Dr. Ford wrote “Building the H Bomb,” and it was published in 2015.

    Before Philadelphia, he spent a year as executive vice president of the University System of Maryland. Earlier, from 1953 to 1975, he was a researcher at Indiana University, physics professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and the University of Massachusetts, and founding chair of the department of physics at the University of California, Irvine.

    Officials at UC Irvine said in a tribute: Dr. Ford “leaves an enduring legacy as a scientist, educator, and institution builder. … The School of Physical Sciences honors his foundational role in our history and celebrates the broad impact of his distinguished life.”

    As Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ opens, Kenneth Ford recalls working on the H-Bomb

    He told The Inquirer that he hung out at the local library as he grew up in a Kentucky suburb of Cincinnati and read every book he could find about “biology, chemistry, geology, you name it.” He went on to write 11 books about physics, flying, and building the H-bomb.

    Two of his books won awards, and 2015’s Building the H Bomb: A Personal History became a hit when the Department of Energy unsuccessfully tried to edit out some of his best material. His research papers on particle scattering, the nuclear transparency of neutrons, and other topics are cited in hundreds of publications.

    Dr. Ford was a popular professor because he created interesting demonstrations of physics for his students.

    In 1976, he earned a distinguished service citation from the American Association of Physics Teachers. In 2006, he earned an AAPT medal for notable contributions to the teaching of physics.

    He was the valedictorian at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 1944. He served two years in the Navy and earned a summa cum laude bachelor’s degree in physics at Harvard University and his doctorate at Princeton in 1953.

    Does Kenneth Ford reveal nuclear-bomb secrets?

    In 1968, he was so opposed to the Vietnam War that he publicly declined to ever again work in secret or on weapons. “It was a statement of principle,” he told The Inquirer.

    Kenneth William Ford was born May 1, 1926, in West Palm Beach, Fla. He married Karin Stehnike in 1953, and they had a son, Paul, and a daughter, Sarah. After a divorce, he married Joanne Baumunk, and they had daughters Caroline and Star, and sons Adam and Jason. His wife and former wife died earlier.

    This photo shows Dr. Ford (center) and other students listening to former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt speak in 1944.

    Dr. Ford lived in University City, Germantown, and Mount Airy before moving to Foulkeways in 2019. He was an avid pilot and glider for decades. He enjoyed folk dancing, followed the Eagles closely, and excelled at Scrabble and other word games.

    He loved ice cream, coffee, and bad puns. He became a Quaker and wore a peace sign button for years. Ever the writer, he edited the Foulkeways newsletter.

    In 2023, he said: “I spent my whole life looking for new challenges.” His son Jason said. “He found connections between things. He had an active mind that went in all different directions.”

    In addition to his children, Dr. Ford is survived by 14 grandchildren, a great-grandson, a sister, a stepdaughter, Nina, and other relatives.

    Services are to be from 2 to 4:30 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 24, at Foulkeways at Gwynedd, 1120 Meetinghouse Rd., Gwynedd, Pa. 19436.

    Dr. Ford and his son Jason
    Dr. Ford wore a peace sign button for years.
  • In unprecedented move, NASA cuts short space mission over astronaut’s health

    In unprecedented move, NASA cuts short space mission over astronaut’s health

    For the first time in the International Space Station’s history, NASA said it was cutting short a crew mission after an astronaut “experienced a medical situation.”

    “It’s in the best interests of our astronauts to return Crew-11 ahead of their planned departure,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told reporters at a news conference Thursday, without naming the astronaut or specifying what the problem was.

    The four-person Crew-11 is made up of U.S. astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, along with Japan’s Kimiya Yui and Russia’s Oleg Platonov. Together, they have spent about five months aboard the space station and had planned to stay until mid-February.

    On Wednesday, they were conducting scientific research, ahead of a planned space walk, when one of the astronauts had a medical issue that required help from the other crew members and onboard medical equipment, NASA officials said.

    “The astronaut is absolutely stable. This is not an emergent evacuation,” said NASA’s Chief Health and Medical Officer, J.D. Polk.

    He said the issue also did not reflect a problem with the space station environment and “was not an injury that occurred in the pursuit of operations.”

    Although the Space Station has medical equipment onboard, he said the issue was sufficient to warrant bringing the astronaut back for a full work-up and diagnosis at a facility with more extensive hardware and without the challenges of working in microgravity.

    “Always we err on the side of the astronaut’s health and welfare. And in this particular case, we are doing the same,” he said.

    The crew will return to Earth in the “coming days,” Isaacman said, with plans for a parachute-assisted splashdown off the coast of California. And because of that early departure, Crew-12, which had been scheduled to take over in mid-February, could be deployed earlier.

    “This is exactly what our astronauts train and prepare for,” he added.

    Crew members live and work aboard the International Space Station, orbiting Earth 16 times a day. Run as an international partnership by five space agencies, the station has had more than 290 visitors representing 26 countries since it was assembled in 1998.