Southern Hemisphere storms, and financial transparency report

While those of us in the Northern Hemisphere have been whining about snow and ice, it is summer in the Southern Hemisphere, so it’s their cyclone (hurricane) season. Madagascar was just hit by one during our snowmageddon, and another (Tropical Depression 21, becoming Tropical Storm Dezani as I write this) is headed that way …

Sadly these storms often get little attention in the western media. Last week’s Cyclone Fytia caused several fatalities and significant damage, and Dezani is likely to add to the misery.

Australia too has had several cyclone, with Mitchell paralleling the west coast this evening (their time, morning on the US East Coast):

The phrase “sparsely populated” has a different meaning down there than in the US or Europe, and if you in the path of one of these things it’s of little comfort that you don’t have much company. But in any event the damage isn’t forecast to be extensive:

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On an administrative note, first I want to give a heartfelt “thank you” to all who donated to keep the blog going last year. I’m still struggling over what to do with this as I try to figure out my future, as I’m in that weird “no longer working full time but still apparently working full time” transition. At this point I’d really rather be doing Tai Chi, raising bees, and getting caught up on the latest quantum mechanics research, but that’s life. In the interests of transparency, and as I try sort out my taxes, here’s the numbers for 2025.

It cost $37,505.65 to run the blog. Of course most of that is for maintaining equipment such as satellite receiver upgrade, replacing a high speed router and computer on the satellite processing network, as well as lesser expenses like electricity, extra internet bandwidth that I wouldn’t otherwise need, the WordPress account, hard disk drives, and so forth. That’s fairly typical – my geophysical data processing system has averaged about $60 thousand a year over the last decade. I did simplify the system last year somewhat as I’m not longer doing commercial operations, but some of the equipment was aging out, I expect expenses to be lower this year (hopefully $30k or so) but another computer might need upgrading so that’s probably low.

Why not just get the data and graphics off the internet like most weather bloggers do? Several reasons. There is some data that comes in over satellite that isn’t available easily over the internet. Data volume is another: the GOES East feel alone 31 megabits per second, and generates about 2 TB of data a day. Second, I do my own processing of the raw data here so I don’t have to rely on other sources. It’s faster, and I have custom enhancements. I don’t just use models, I run them here. The above graphics were generated from raw data and created here. The infrastructure to do that is a big cost (and time) factor.

After the processing expenses from Stripe, there were $14,407.79 in donations received. That’s less than the year before (over $25k), but we didn’t have as many storms threatening the US, and donations track the threat level. That’s an unfortunate aspect of doing this: the equipment costs the same if there is one storm or ten. That’s partly why I started doing a bit more with winter storms, to see how that would impact off-season donations.

So that’s what the numbers look like. I’m not a non-profit so technically I don’t have to tell you any of this (and I’m not really trolling for donations although it would be nice if more of the expenses were covered). I’ve had a couple of offers from people to help with doing fund raising and run the blog/social media, but I haven’t followed up because I’m concerned that I’d have more administrative work to do (and I hate that!). If anybody has any ideas that involve letting me do what I do with minimal administrative overhead let me know.

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