When I explain the concept of a multiscale modelling framework (MMF), or super-parameterization, I often find it helpful to show a picture of what it “looks like”. There’s a few classic images for this that I’ve used for years. Here’s one of the original images commissioned by CMMAP:

And here’s a more recent one commissioned by the Exascale Computing Project to develop E3SM-MMF:

And now I have this fancy one that I made with ACTUAL data from a E3SM-MMF run:

This is an instantaneous output from a run where I made the CRMs a bit higher resolution than normal to make it look nicer. The surface shading is the precipitation rate, and the shading within each CRM is using the cloud liquid and ice tracers.

I’m a bit embarrassed to share the code that I used to make this… it’s very convoluted… but I’m happy to share if somebody actually wants it.

Also, feel free to use any of these images for… whatever.

So it’s been awhile since I’ve posted any updates, and that’s partly because I’ve been busy/lazy, but also because MY WEBSITE GOT HACKED! It was a very frustrating experience. Since I’m cheap and I like DIY projects, I decided to try an manually clean up the code. Most of a wordpress site is written in PHP, which I actually learned a bit about in college but I don’t remember much of it. It was a good learning experience and I’d encourage anyone in a similar situation to try it out before paying a big company to come in and fix it for you.

I was recently interviewed for an article at the Daily Beast by Bahar Gholipour. She had recently been forwarded a press release from Peter Ward about an upcoming talk at the 2018 meeting of the Geological Soceity of America about his “ground-breaking” research showing that the common understanding of the greenhouse effect is wrong. This is, of course, ridiculous, and she found my previous post on Peter’s ideas and wondered what I thought about whether we should really be accommodating to people like him.

Why Is a Climate Change Skeptic Headlining Science Conferences?

I think this is an excellent question that I’ve thought about it quite a bit. I really like the discussion in the article. There’s a clear distinction in the article that his ideas are clearly misguided, and the discussion nicely focuses on the central question of how and why these ideas are given a platform. 

To answer the central question plainly, I think that people like Dr. Ward should be given a platform at conferences. However, in the specific case of Dr. Ward, he has repeatedly failed to support his claims with concrete evidence, and we should NOT give valuable conference speaking time to people who do not adhere to the scientific method. 

Giving time to climate skeptics may feel like a painful waste, but it’s the fair and professional thing to do. This is assuming that they are civil, respectful, and open to criticism of their fringe ideas. The tendency of scientists to eviscerate each other’s work means that conference talks about potentially paradigm shifting ideas will invoke well-informed and thoughtful challenges, which you won’t get from personal blogs or social media. Being able to adequately address these challenges is critical for moving a fringe idea into mainstream acceptance. 

I was going through some stuff today and found these notes I typed up a couple years ago on the derivation of the “perturbation enstrophy budget” that I never posted! So I’m putting them here now in case anyone is stumbling around the internet looking for such things. I also wrote up some notes on the “perturbation potential enstrophy budget”, which is pretty interesting, but I can’t find them. Maybe in another year I’ll stumble on them too! Continue reading →

I recently realized that the data from the relatively new Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite can show incredibly fine detail! The spatial resolution is 0.1×0.1 degrees and its available at a 30 minute temporal resolution! This is particularly exciting because lately I’ve been doing some very fine grained analysis of a model with a 30 minute timestep, so this allows a very direct comparison between the “real-time” weather in observations and a model. Today I made some animations of GPM data and just wanted to share. The animations below are from January 1, 2017. This choice was arbitrary, there’s nothing special about this date that I chose. Note that the swath of the GPM data can’t cover the whole globe every 30 minutes, so the swath data is blended with other satellite data to make the IMERG data that was used here (The specific IMERG variable here is “precipitationCal”). This sometimes results in some funny looking artifacts or clouds that don’t seem to move in a natural way. Continue reading →

When serving as a reviewer of a journal article I usually do not reveal my identity, but some people in my field choose to self identify on a regular basis. I’ve been reconsidering my stance on this and thought I’d share my list of pros and cons. Continue reading →

This is just a personal update. I’m wrapping up my work on African easterly waves at NC State and heading out to California to start a new job at Lawrence-Livermore National Lab (LLNL). I’ll be working on a relatively new climate model called ACME for the US Department of Energy. I’m not sure how the recent political environment will affect the funding for climate work at National labs. There seems to be sufficient evidence to be concerned, but I’m not too worried at the moment. Continue reading →

Understanding the various sources of heating in the atmosphere, like convection and radiation,  is critically important in Tropical meteorology. Unfortunately we cannot just go out and directly measure the temperature tendency from convection. However, we can measure the temperature and estimate how it changes as a result of air flowing over an area, and then calculate the “leftover” residual temperature tendency to get an idea of how diabatic processes (i.e. convection and radiation) are heating the atmosphere. In practice, there are two widely used approaches to produce these estimates, and the goal of this article is to provide a brief comparison of them. Continue reading →

When I’m finalizing figures I like to go through and make sure they are adequately annotated. For example, it’s nice to have the units and variable name[s] mentioned somewhere on the plot for the casual reader that’s just skimming through and doesn’t want to take the time read through the figure captions. However, lately I’ve been running into the issue of NCL incorrectly positioning the titles of the x-axis and the colorbar (see example below). Continue reading →

I recently read an article by the Gaurdian about the Carmichael coal mine project in Austrailia, which may become one of the largest in the world. There have been several concerns raised about the environmental impact of the new mine, and similar projects to follow in the area. The article focused on the discussion of climate impacts, and it really struck me how well the article portrayed the difficult trade-offs that have to be made when weighing environmental and economic concerns.  Continue reading →