New team looks beyond daily forecasts

There has never been a more important time for California residents to understand what is happening with the weather. From rising seas, to expansive droughts, to ever-more-dangerous fire seasons, the weather has become critical to our immediate safety and even our future existence.

That’s why I am delighted to announce the addition of a new Chronicle team dedicated to bringing you the information you need to understand the weather and its relation to climate change and to make smart decisions about your life.

The California Weather Wonks represent a dramatic expansion of our weather coverage and the introduction of a scientific approach to weather journalism. In addition to covering breaking weather news, the team will produce a daily Bay Area forecast, rich explainers behind crucial weather phenomena and, coming soon, a daily newsletter.

This project is also designed to be a conversation with you, our readers. Our team will provide much more than a daily Bay Area forecast. The California Weather Wonks will explain how and

why weather events are happening outside your window, and we will take you inside the process of forecasting weather, explaining how we make predictions and why we sometimes blow a call.

We hope those of you who already are fans of weather forecasting will become participants in the coverage. If you ever wanted to share your forecasting skills with others and argue over which model is best on a given day, the California Weather Wonks want to talk to you. And we hope those of you new to weather science will jump in, too, asking questions and joining the conversation.

We want to create a community of voices discussing this critical subject. To join the team, reach out to weather wonks@sfchronicle.com. Or just jump into the comments section of our forecasts. We named the team the California Weather Wonks because we will give readers a rigorous, science-based approach to weather coverage, and we’ve hired a terrific group of journalists to do just that. The Wonks are led by Weather Science editor Hannah Hagemann. Hannah comes to us from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, where she did exemplary work on the 2020 CZU August Lightning Complex wildfires and covered the science behind extreme weather events on the Central Coast.

Hannah is joined by The

We will give readers a rigorous, sciencebased approach to weather coverage, and we’ve hired a terrific team to do that.

Chronicle’s first staff meteorologist, Gerry Díaz, a veteran of the National Weather Service Bay Area, who will be familiar to Chronicle readers because he has been quoted in many of our weather stories through the years. During his time at the NWS, Gerry worked hard to improve how Spanishspeaking communities are informed about extreme weather events.

Our lead weather reporter, Jack Lee, has written for the Mercury News, the Scientist magazine and Science News, among other publications. On a personal note, he is the first journalist I have ever hired who has a doctorate in molecular biology from Princeton University. We don’t see that in many newsrooms.

This team won’t work in a silo. It will often partner with our existing science and climate team, which is led by editor Kate Galbraith, to bring you everything you need to know about how climate change is affecting the state.

Our role model for this project is the Capital Weather Gang, the community-based team at the Washington Post that pioneered digital meteorology (and is among those credited with inventing the term “snowmageddon” to describe a paralyzing snow event). We thank Capital Weather Gang editor Jason Samenow, as well as the many members of the Bay Area weather community who have shared their expertise as we were building this initiative.

We hope you will enjoy the work of the team and look forward to your participation. You can find our coverage on SFChronicle.com, in the Chronicle app and by subscribing to the California Weather Wonks newsletter, which will launch soon.