Andy Berner

@andybrnr

Meteorology PhD, data scientist, ski mountaineer, GSP and Eurohound dad

861 Following472 Followers1,789 Posts

YouTube Bluesky

Is this your profile?Claim it and andybrnr.dirty.social is yours.Claim profile

Andy Berner@andybrnr· 20d

Fable gets it.

Andy Berner@andybrnr· 21d

@markhamillofficial.bsky.social I sense an endorsement opportunity…

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Jul 9

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Jun 29

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Jun 27

Wall-E vibes.

Screenshot of an overweight human in a hoverchair from the Pixar film WallE

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Jun 13

Conspiracy time! Does CBS somehow share the infra for the CSPAN feed? Did they cut it at Bari’s request?

Andy Berner@andybrnr· May 29

Andy Berner@andybrnr· May 14

I try to keep my dogs exercised so they’re less likely to disassemble the house :)

Andy Berner@andybrnr· May 13

I mean, I wasn’t alive then, either - I’m more or less echoing Prof. Vaughan’s read, I think?

It is not clear in retrospect why PATCO—a traditionally Democratic union—would en- dorse a conservative Republican presidential candidate. But it made sense to them at the
time. They were disillusioned with Carter. Reagan was labor, himself a former president of the Screen Actors Guild who led actors in a strike against film studios. As governor of California, he had walked a careful line, not laying down a clear pattern of actions either for or against labor unions. Indeed, he had avoided a punitive policy and demonstrated restraint with strikers, 26 He was actively courting unions in his campaign, and they were endorsing him. The clincher was a letter he wrote PATCO on October 20, 1980, prom-
ising support in exchange for endorsement: "In an area so clearly associated with public safety, the Carter administration has failed to act responsibly. You can rest assured that
if I am elected president, I will take whatever

steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most modern equip- ment available and to adjust staff levels and workdays so that they are commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety.... I pledge to you that our government will work very closely with you to bring about a spirit of cooperation between the President
and the air traffic controllers."IZ7 Believing that Reagan was in their corner, PATCO's demands for the new FAA contract were far beyond anything ever asked for by federal union employees and what the law allowed federal workers to negotiate. 178 They were even beyond what some PATCO members believed they deserved in the high-inflation period of the 1980s. Of the union's ninety- six demands, the top three were for facilities fully staffed with controllers, the replacement of outdated equipment, and the right to ne- gotiate rights in collective bargaining equal to or greater than those of postal employees, including the right to strike under some situations. But some of the other demands stymied a settlement and publicly branded the union as greedy: a $10,000 salary increase for every controller, semiannual cost-of-living
raises one and a half times the inflation rate, a

four-day workweek of thirty-two hours (con- trollers elsewhere in the world were working between twenty-nine and thirty-eight hours a week, while US controllers in some places were running six- to seven-day workweeks plus overtime). They also demanded a secure re- tirement plan: because of insufficient staffing,
controllers' retirement was not guaranteed.tº As negotiations stalled, PATCO threatened to strike on June 22, 1981, at which point Reagan offered the union what was possibly the most generous set of concessions made to a federal public employee union in govern- ment history, 18º FAA personnel were stunned by the capitulation. PATCO members were divided. The offer was much lower than what they asked for. Combined with the insults they had already suffered from the FAA and the Carter administration, the offer was one more. Confident of Reagan's support in spite of his unwillingness to make further conces- sions, the union set a second strike date for August 3, 1981. On that day, nearly 85 per- cent of PATCO's membership—about 12,300 controllers—walked out.181 Four hours into the strike, President Reagan took a strong stand against the illegal strike, ordering the strikers
back to work in forty-eight hours or be fired.

Andy Berner@andybrnr· May 5

Conning at sunset.

Pic out the left side of a Hawaiian Airlines A330 over the wing, the start of a contrail visible from the left engine exhaust. Solid stratocumulus deck far below, the sky takes an orange hue on the horizon as the flight heads NE, enroute SEA from OGG over the pacific.

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Apr 16

Big, fluffy flakes in the Cascade foothills with a convergence zone over the I-90 corridor. Wish we’d had more this winter, but it’s fun to look at while we’ve got it. Even a bit of thunder earlier.

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Apr 5

E.g. price of Jet A in Singapore. His read was that if things were fixed tomorrow, the markets would mostly smooth out by mid to end of summer, but each day it goes on increases risks in a compounding fashion.

Chart of the price of jet fuel in Singapore from Jan 2021 to April 2026. The war with Iran and closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused it to spike to an all time high of $221/bbl.

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Mar 30

Tl;dr

Summary
For 1 GW dissipated over ~400,000 m², the local atmospheric temperature anomaly directly over the facility is approximately 0.5–2 K under typical conditions, potentially rising to several K on exceptionally calm, stable nights (temperature inversions), and dropping below 0.5 K on windy days. The dominant removal mechanism is advection/convection, not radiation, and the heat source is intense enough to generate its own convective circulation even in calm conditions.

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Mar 26

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Mar 20

Thank you so much for sharing your journey, both in this story and through your writing over the last decade! You were one of my inspirations to get into recreational mushing (in a small way - just two dog skijor). Working with and learning from my dogs has immeasurably enriched my life!

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Mar 18

Bizarrely, he mentioned Kharg as far back as a 1988 interview with Polly Toynbee in the Guardian:

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Mar 18

This is _way_ more accurate than what Grammerly was pushing, lol.

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Mar 17

I think they're already nerfing it, but wow that was fun while it lasted.

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Mar 17

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Mar 14

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Mar 12

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Mar 9

Stat mech - the beginning (and sometimes end) of consciousness.

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Mar 8

Sounds like a job for...

Cropped image of the marine from the cover art for DOOM, the classic FPS game.

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Mar 5

US CPI, European Nat Gas, US Gasoline prices. COVID inflation kicks in around 2021. Can see the gasoline spike was actually quicker, but the nat gas price spike kicked in hard a few months after the war started, then things normalized a bit.

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Feb 11

Adult Great Blue Herons have the contrasting feathers on the upper wing surface.

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Feb 6

Missed some of the best color of the evening due to a dead phone battery, but still got some cool shots. The tug slowly pulling a log raft South down the Saratoga Passage was neat.

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Feb 3

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Jan 23

Of course the shitty ski season happens the year I decide to take a sabbatical between jobs, lol. Still enough coverage to keep the skijor trails open, but not gonna last much longer unless the stormtrack shifts.

Andy Berner@andybrnr· Jan 20

Meteogram from the ECMWF AIFS ensemble: charts.ecmwf.int/products/aif...