Welcome to the first BumpySkies newsletter of 2026, coming at you from the wintry heart of New York City.

Lots of improvements

I've put a lot of work into BumpySkies, my free turbulence forecast website, in the month that's passed since the previous issue. Let's talk about it!

Forecasts with more foresight

BumpySkies now uses two different FAA data sources to get flight path information, instead of the single one that it had relied on since launch. This allows BumpySkies to create turbulence forecasts for most flights far sooner than it could before.

This should really cut down on how often the "It's too early to give you a forecast" screen appears, which in many cases would persist even as the plane was rolling down the runway. As a welcome side effect, this work also improves the way that BumpySkies handles updates to flight information, including flight paths and departure times.

My gratitude goes out to everyone who reported the cases of BumpySkies shrugging helplessly through takeoff, making it clear to me how prevalent this issue was. In some ways, installing that Report an Issue button in December was the most important change I've made to the website since resuming work on it late last year. Hearing directly from so many of you has been so rewarding, both in terms of directing me towards what I should work on next, and more generally just seeing how many people value the BumpySkies service. Every email reminds me why I love working on this project!

Multiple-leg flight support

Another thing I didn't know until BumpySkies users told me about it: Airlines quite frequently run separate, contiguous flights under the same flight number. For example, an airline might have a daily flight that visits a sequence of three cities, or which travels to a distant city and then flies back again, all operating under the same flight number.

Since I originally designed BumpySkies without knowing this, the website never handled these multiple-leg flights well. However, the problem wasn't very obvious until BumpySkies started receiving flight plans long before takeoff, as described in the previous section. This had an unintended knock-on effect: the single forecast that BumpySkies displayed for a multi-leg flight was a matter of whichever leg it happened to have received the most recent data for, regardless of which leg was next scheduled to take off.

So, I fixed that too. Now, if BumpySkies knows about multiple legs under the flight number that you asked it about, then it'll show you the forecasts for all of them. Since this feature required some user interface experimentation on my part, I'd love to know what you think of it, if you happen to come across it!

More robust weather data

I've changed the NOAA weather source that BumpySkies gets its turbulence-intensity data from. The new source contains quite a lot more data, at a higher resolution than before. The turbulence forecast map still looks and works the same as it always did, for now—it's just powered by much more detailed information, under the hood.

This change actually came more from necessity than choice. In a funny coincidence, I discovered while researching an unrelated feature that NOAA planned to retire the server that BumpySkies has been pulling weather data from since 2016. Happily, this notice included information about the newer source, and advised all users to start using it instead.

This makes me feel grateful that I resumed active work on the project when I did. If I hadn't, then turbulence data would have quietly stopped flowing in February with no explanation. It's likely that I would have assumed that the US government finally got around to defunding that part of NOAA, and I would have retired the whole of BumpySkies as a result. Happily, it's nothing so nefarious as all that (this time).

Bits and bobs

Finally, a few miscellaneous improvements:

• The airline list now includes Piedmont and Air Canada Rouge.
• I split the FAQ entries about turbulence safety onto their own page.
• BumpySkies now processes 18 hours of weather-forecast data, instead of 12, as it always had before. The further-seeing flight plan data made this necessary!

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Speaking of nefarious plans

One thread tying all of the past month's work together has been a thorough refresh of the ways that BumpySkies uses weather and flight data that the US government makes continuously available to the public.

The bureaucracy is good, actually

BumpySkies would never have been possible without the existence of these free, high-quality data sources—or the government employees who both make them available and directly help curious folks like me in finding and using them. These civil servants do this work out of a passionate belief that open information, made available for free to researchers and creators of every kind, is necessary to the continued health and growth of the American project.

The current executive administration's indiscriminate tearing away at the civil service acts in direct opposition to this ideal, and threatens vast harm to the country. Over the last year, more than a quarter-million federal employees have been summarily purged without congressional oversight, including within the taxpayer-funded scientific organizations that makes projects like BumpySkies possible. As I write this in January 2026, I am particularly concerned about threats to destroy NCAR, a pinnacle of American climate research, for no clear reason aside from presidential pique. If NCAR does get harmed or dismantled, then I fear for the effects this would have on the quality or even availability of the weather data that BumpySkies needs.

BumpySkies persists

I first launched BumpySkies shortly after the 2016 US presidential election, and part of why I didn't put much active attention into it thereafter was doubt that its constituent data sources would outlast the new administration's overtly anti-science stance, particularly where it concerned weather and climate data. But it did. And when Trump took power again eight years later and his team immediately began savagely clawing at the country's universities and scientific institutions, I felt even less inclined to work on BumpySkies.

And yet, October 2025 came, and the website still worked, despite everything. I put some of this up to luck, and much of it to the resilience of the federal workers and scientists who remain at their suddenly threatened and immiserated roles, keeping their vital projects and services running for as long as they can, in spite of unprecedented opposition from the country's executive branch. Perhaps my call to pick BumpySkies back up as an active project is my expression of resistance, of my demonstrating through work and attention my faith that the United States's role as a beacon of knowledge and human furtherance is larger and longer-lived than a temporary administration given to destructive and retributive atavism.

I'm glad we're flying together

It's been a long time since I've felt so much passion for any day-to-day project. Like the stalwart civil servants I've re-established contact with as part of this work, I plan to keep BumpySkies running and growing for as long as it's possible for me to do so. Thank you for being part of it—knowing I'm helping so many of my fellow nervous flyers during a difficult time makes the effort all worthwhile to me.

My inbox is always open for feedback about BumpySkies. And if you know someone whose life might be a made a little better by BumpySkies, please tell them about it, too.