There’s a nice figure of model forecasts produced by the International Research Institute (IRI) for Climate and Society at Columbia University (see below). It’s a nice plot, but it’s hard to see the ensemble averages, which is what I’m most interested in looking at. Continue reading
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Pseudo-Lagrangian Moisture Tendency
A paper of mine just came out in Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences (JAS)! I love the feeling of seeing a paper finally come out.
Hannah, W. M., B. E. Mapes, and G. S. Elsaesser, 2016: A Lagrangian View of Moisture Dynamics During DYNAMO. J. Atmos. Sci., 73, 1967-1985.
RIP Dr. Bill Gray
Yesterday I heard about the passing of Dr. William Gray. Dr. Gray was a pioneer in the field of hurricane forecasting, and produced a lot of valuable scientific papers.
I only had a few direct conversations with him during my time at CSU, but I heard him speak on several occasions. He will be dearly missed by many. Continue reading
More Climate Maps!
I often find myself asking questions like, “what direction does the wind blow over Spain in the summer?” I’ve always thought it would be nice to have a bunch of maps of basic meteorological variables. Initially I was going to print out a bunch of maps or a big poster that I could post on my wall, but this would be a huge pain to change if I realized later on that the colors were a bad choice, or the vectors were too small.
Hard Drive Woes
Australian Easterly Waves
Atlantic tropical cyclones often form from easterly waves generated over Africa. Although these waves are not completely understood, we know a lot about how they form. In short, they exist during Northern Hemisphere (i.e. boreal) summer because of the temperature difference between the hot, dry Saharan desert and the relatively cool and wet surface near the equator. The large deserts of western Australia should provide similar conditions during the Southern Hemisphere (i.e. austral) summer, but I never hear anyone talking about “Australian easterly waves”. I decided to look into this the other day and share what I found. Continue reading
Flat vs. Round – How can people prove it to themselves?
I am what you might call a “round-earth”-er, and I was surprised to see this recent resurgence of people claiming that the earth is flat. I started reading more about this and inevitably ended up on the site of the Flat Earth Society (as well as aplanetruth.info). As a disclaimer, I still think the earth is round, but I do find the skeptical nature of flat-earthers interesting.
Recent News & Goals for 2016
I came up short on a few of my resolutions for 2015. I wanted to submit 2 journal articles, but I only submitted 1. I actually submitted another one at the start of 2016, so I almost made it! I also haven’t fixed my password problem… but I’m still working on it. On the other hand I’ve been pretty good about putting content up on this website, which I feel great about. I’ve been getting good feedback and some people have contacted saying that my CESM debugging notes have been helpful. Continue reading
Perturbation Available Potential Energy
The subject of available potential energy (APE) in atmospheric science is a bit abstract, but it’s very interesting once you get past some of the subtle complexities. Any dynamics textbook should have a better explanation than I can give, but in short APE is the amount of total potential energy that can be converted into kinetic energy. Continue reading
The MJO in the national news!
Although I don’t consider Buzzfeed.com to be the most reliable source for news, I was surprised to find a recent article by Dan Vergano that discusses the warm weather we saw in the US during December 2015.