Kelly Hereid

@kellyhereid

Climate scientist, geologist, and catastrophe modeler, Liberty Mutual. Posts on all things hurricane, wildfire, flood, earthquake, tornado. Sassy takes are mine not employer's. 📍Oakland, CA Website: hereidk.strikingly.com

2.287 Folgt30.120 Follower10.378 Posts

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Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· 16d

Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, John McPhee Those who know me know I'm more a talker than a writer, but that just makes it that much more joyful to see a master at work. The teacher lets you see him sweat a little in this memoir of his writing process. Left me swept by horripilation. 39/

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· 17d

@blkahn.bsky.social has a long running series from the before times of Postcards from the Anthropocene: xcancel.com/blkahn/statu...

Postcard from the Anthropocene, with people and caribou swimming during a heat wave in northern Finland

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· 17d

Also there's a grim reaper.

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· 17d

I was confused by the worm in a shoe but then...wholesome? Libraries! 📚♥️📚

Berkeley the Bookworm
Yarn bookworm in pink, purple, green, and yellow with puffy textured hair, reading a newspaper, living inside a purple high top sneaker decorated with white stars and rainbow laces.

Letter:
I made Berkeley the Bookworm in honor of Star, the librarian. When I was a kid, one of my first jobs was shelving books in the kids' section at the North Berkeley Branch.

Star was the children's librarian. She always wore purple converse hightops and was as enthusiastic, kind, and as patient as could be with a young reader like me. Stepping into the kids' section, with its high rainbow archway, was like stepping into my own little safe world full of books to keep me company. I ended up being an author + editor — so it just goes to show the power libraries can have!

Molly Loomis

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· 17d

This figure of increasing number of buildings exposed to fires in the west is... striking

Increasing trend in exposed structures in western US from 2001-2020
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026EF008372

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· 18d

Pro tips: Don't name your company something creepy and dystopian.

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· 19d

Really enjoyed her Turning to Stone as well

Marcia Bjornerud, Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· 22d

Men at Arms, Terry Pratchett Deep into Watch books now, this is the origin of the famous Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness 38/

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· 24d

It's a bit weird to subscribe to DC wx forecasts when I live in CA, but @capitalweather.com newsletter regularly highlights data I take right to my day job. All those weather balloon stories (which they flagged weeks ago)? Great link to NASA data showing they're biggest obs reducing forecast error

Fractional forecast impact summary from NASA. Number one item is radiosonde.

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· 26d

This spatial relationship was tested in a case study in Delaware, but holds for 175 of 203 US watersheds (HUC4)

Elevation difference between rural/urban in US HUC4 watersheds, with biggest difference in the western US. Most of the map is warm colors, indicating higher elevation rural / lower elevation urban. Fig 15 in Supp Info https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1029%2F2026GL122550&file=2026GL122550-sup-0001-Supporting+Information+SI-S01.pdf

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· 27d

It's got hurricanes. It's got turtles. It's got a turtle-based hurricane observing system. Now with "all weather capability" 🐢🌀 In-situ oceanographic observations of tropical cyclones from instrumented sea turtles Chapman ERL iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· 27d

Anyway here's tiny me from 20+ years ago looking for plants, all day every day all summer long (the metal detector was to find tags) echinaceaproject.org/people/teams/

Tiny Kellys from a million years ago doing field surveys on Echinacea project

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· 28d

Updated to almost 500K

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jul 12

Salt Lakes - An Unnatural History, @cetracey.bsky.social A fun mashup of salt lake ecology and geology, environmental history, and queer travel memoir? Might not be an obvious mix but it works, and I learned a lot about phalaropes 🪶 37/

Salt Lakes - An Unnatural History, Caroline Tracey

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jul 11

Typically hits cat nat - some more updated loss estimates here. Not huge, but not nothing: share.google/fHpmp3nlKwGt...

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jul 10

Major bottleneck for improving flash flood forecasts in the National Water Model? You guessed it, streamflow assimilation. Can't get the payoff in progressively fancier modeling and forecasts without on-the-ground investments in solid observational data. journals.ametsoc.org/view/journal...

Evaluation of Short-Range Streamflow Forecasts at Flash-Flood Prone Basins with the National Water Model
Felipe Quintero

, Witold F. Krajewski

, and Humberto Vergara

Online Publication: 08 Jul 2026

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jul 10

Ok well that's even worse - to be fair I thought to check the levees in my other example bc I moved just down the road from the other leveed area during the flood of 93, so it was clear there were some data problems.

Flood map of STL metro area, with FEMA and AI flood maps in dark blue and light blue respectively. A light blue area is circled and labeled with the word "levee"

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jul 10

Both the promise and the peril are right here in fig 5. Right side - artificial boundary in flood map aligned to administrative boundary - that's bad! Fill that gap! Left side - huge count of buildings added, when even a cursory check would show that the light blue area is behind a levee 3/

Two flood maps side by side, dark blue for FEMA maps, light blue for AI supplement. Left side shows a large addition in a river bend at a metro area, right side shows sharp administrative boundary

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jul 8

I'm part of this - wouldn't want ProPublica to get it twisted in 20 years, it's on page 1

Acknowledgments
This report has been prepared by Lisa Sachs, Director, Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI), and Associate Professor, Columbia Climate School, with support from Danielle Fujimoto and Quentin Harel, candidates for the Master of Science in Climate Finance and the Master of Science in Climate, respectively, at the Columbia Climate School. The authors are grateful for the invaluable feedback from Judson Berkey,
Andrew Bowley, Linda French, Martin Hansen, Tomohiro Ishikawa, Rakhi Kumar, Oliver Moullin, Caspar Siegert, Rachel Sumption, and Perrine Toledano who reviewed earlier versions of this paper. The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect institutional views of Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment or Columbia University, nor of any supporting institutions or peer reviewers. The authors maintain full editorial control over the content of this report. Any errors or omissions remain the responsibility of the authors. CCSI received financial support from the Liberty Mutual Climate Transition Center for the preparation of this report.

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jul 4

Timefulness, Marcia Bjornerud Intro to how geologists interpret deep time. I had somehow missed that Claire Patterson, who found lead was basically ubiquitous in the mid 20th century, discovered that in the process of trying to determine Earth's age (4.5bn figure still stands today). Amazing. 36/

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jul 3

I love that these two posts in my feed are side by side Post 1: White House is obliterated by aliens Post 2: Induction burner placement is incorrect Energy brought: 💫 Identical 💫

Post 1: Aliens obliterate the White House
Post 2: Induction burner placement is incorrect
Identical post energy

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jul 3

😭⚒️🧪

Joides Resolution circled and a sad face drawn next to them

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jul 2

Um, love this. DC right now: very weird

Screenshot of DC temperature distribution, highlighting its current weirdness

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jul 2

NYT helping us out by identifying the exact geographic locations where one can acquire delicious poppyseed or apricot sweet kolaches, or confusing breakfast hot dog savory kolaches 🎁 www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

NYT map of high Czech population. Iowa circled and sensibly marked with sweet kolaches, Texas circled with a skeptical note of savory kolaches??

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jul 1

Were you guys *trying* to cite all my favorite stuff or was it just a happy accident? And look @eroston.bsky.social your reporting is so thoroughly researched it ends up cited in econ literature

...market participants, as evidenced by the launch of many climate risk analytics firms. Yet, the services provided by the private sector are often not available to those without sufficient capital to purchase access, thus worsening informational asymmetries in the market and further disadvantaging households, smaller businesses, and local governments with limited resources (Condon 2023; Boomhower et al. 2024). In addition, the lack of transparency around private sector models and methods obscures the quality of their projections, increasing uncertainty for users and creating the potential for misinformation about climate risks (Fiedler et al. 2021; Roston et al. 2024).

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jul 1

To Each This World, @julieczerneda.bsky.social Took a minute to hit its stride, but I have a soft spot for puzzle sci fi, a genre I've totally made up, and this is one of those. Not just aliens and spaceships (it has those too) but a mystery to solve in an unfamiliar setting. 35/

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jun 27

I mean this has been floating around in climate/energy discourse for years now. Could argue about how widespread it is, and seems to be getting less common, but clearly not pulled from nothing:

Act quickly and comprehensively: There is a “window of opportunity” to shape the future of cooling in UK homes, before overheating worsens and the domestic cooling market becomes established. Without action, air-con could become the new normal – creating unnecessary emissions and making it harder to decarbonise homes and the energy system. People should be supported to take a passive-first approach.

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jun 27

Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke Bills itself as a dunk on tradwife influencers, but reads as a sad commentary on all the ways that women are lied to and trapped, by men, by other women, by themselves. 34/

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jun 25

The Road to Brightcity, Máirtín Ó Cadhain Short stories by the author of Graveyard Clay, one of the finest writers in the Irish language. You can see why with every twist of the knife in this collection. A @mattrshelton.bsky.social rec. 33/

Kelly Hereid@kellyhereid· Jun 21

Galatea, Madeline Miller Knocked the wind straight out of me. 32/