A meteorologist weathers the storm
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Last week, New Yorkers woke up to a hazy orange skyline. Smoke from the wildfires raging in Canada had made its way over the border, wiping out skyscrapers and making the air dangerous to breathe. At one point on Wednesday, New York’s air quality was recorded as the worst in the world.
Then on Thursday, scientists announced it would be an El Niño summer, a global weather pattern that could dramatically increase temperatures.
Everything was monitored by Judson Jones, a meteorologist and reporter for The New York Times’ Weather Data team. Since joining the paper in October, Mr. Jones has been monitoring a range of weather phenomena, such as “atmospheric rivers” in California and Arctic blasts in the Northeast. He relies on models and data to keep readers informed as the climate becomes more extreme.
In an interview, Mr. Jones’s coverage of the smoke sweeping through parts of the United States and the evolution of The Times weather reports. This interview has been edited and shortened.
Did you feel like the smoke in New York was going to get as bad as it was?
On Tuesday, we started looking at the forecast models. The high-res model only goes out for 18 hours, so you’re only beginning to get a glimpse. Then the National Weather Service forecasters called it. Wednesday morning, as soon as the sun rose, there was a huge concentration of smoke. The models showed that it held together when this large, dense mass was moving.
It actually arrived about three hours earlier than I expected. The fact that you could see this mass of smoke moving like a blob was bizarre. The time-lapse Earth camera that we released very quickly was apocalyptic. It’s like putting on a giant Instagram filter, or in this case like you’ve Photoshopped out all the buildings.
Do you have ideas for different ways to beat weather events as they become more consistent and impactful?
Our weather team is happy to work with all teams at The Times. We don’t like to keep things to ourselves. That’s what makes us dynamic. Our team already works closely with the people who built our wildfire tracker. Air quality and the smoke forecast are all products that emerged from this group. We’ve thought about how to word this better, how to inform our readers, how to give them something tangible and how to explain what that does to them.
As we go forward, we’re going to encourage even more group collaboration. Every fire, every situation is different. Even as these fires burn in the middle of nowhere, the smoke hits someone.
The El Niño summer has just been officially announced. It feels like everything is coming together.
El Niño will probably not have an immediate effect on everything. It doesn’t always have a huge effect on summer weather patterns. But as we go into winter, you really start to see that shift. Globally, we’re going to see those effects very much as we go into that season.
El Niño really does affect weather patterns worldwide. Expect Australia and parts of Indonesia to be drier. You also see more drought in South America. The wet weather patterns in places like southern Brazil and parts of Argentina and Chile — you can see that shift a little bit more. There is more drought towards South Africa and elsewhere. In India, it affects the monsoon season.
Are we going to see this right away? Probably not. But the more it holds on and the stronger it gets, the more we see these dramatic changes.
As a meteorologist and journalist, what is your response to these events – extreme heat, wildfires, El Niño – happening simultaneously?
I don’t want to overdo it. I think we are already seeing the extremes, partly due to climate change. These extremes happen in La Niña and El Niño years.
We try to let people know about extremes before they happen. We recently launched a tracker for extreme weather conditions. You can currently choose up to four locations in the United States and you will receive an email notifying you if extreme weather is likely in your area. We try to inform people as well as possible about extreme weather. There are great meteorologists and scientists out there producing a lot of great information, and we’re trying to make that more readily available to the public.
Do you think about how weather coverage in The Times might evolve as climate change continues?
The amazing thing about The New York Times is that it is dedicated to covering the climate and climate change, and reporting on what can and cannot be attributed to climate change. Many other media organizations had weather teams that later became climate teams. The Times has done it the other way around.
We are very excited. Our team dives into this and works together with the Climate Desk on articles and questions. Can we attribute this to climate change? What do scientists say on that subject? We think it’s important to say honestly when we know and when we don’t, or rather when scientists know and when they don’t.
I heard you got in trouble as a kid for running to the window in school to try and see a tornado. Do you still find the weather so exciting?
There’s something about the raw power of it – it’s not something you can control, but it’s interesting to try and understand. The sad thing is when it hits something. The coolest thing to see is a tornado in the middle of a cornfield and doing nothing at all.
There’s something pretty powerful about the natural beauty of these things.