It would be hard to find a scientific paper that does not use the word “respectively” to be precise about the sequential referencing of previous words in a sentence. Even though it is usually “correct” to use this word, I feel that it is often unnecessary because the context gives adequate information for the reader to figure out the meaning on their own.
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.
In my last post I discussed a paper that described the theory of effective static stability (O’Gorman 2011). Dr. O’Gorman posted a MATLAB script for calculating effective static stability, but since I work with NCL, I wanted convert his code into an NCL function. The original MATLAB code only worked on one profile at a time, but the function below “should” work for a multi-dimensional array, but I won’t guarantee that it will work for any array size. Continue reading
A lot of interesting weather phenomena are associated with various types of atmospheric waves. In most cases, we have a good understanding of wave dynamics when the atmosphere is dry and there’s no condensation or evaporation, but we lack a solid understanding of how things change when moist convection gets involved (i.e. clouds). A good example is how convectively coupled Kelvin waves move at a fraction of the speed compared to their dry counter parts (Kiladis 2009). I recently read the paper below by Paul O’Gorman that discusses a simple way to modify dry theory such that the effects of heating by convection can be implicitly included.
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
In a previous post I outlined how I set up CESM in aqua-planet mode with a specified sea surface temperature (SST) distribution. However, there are a few drawbacks to using prescribed SST. The biggest caveat is that fixed surface temperature can effectively be an infinite source of energy. I saw a poster a at a meeting last year that compared a simulation with prescribed SST to another with a slab ocean model (SOM) and the results were very striking, so I started thinking that I need to explore this type of modelling more. Below are my notes for setting up a aqua-planet slab-ocean configuration in CESM 1.2 on the Yellowstone machine (Linux) with the intel compiler.
Many people frame debates over climate science with a false dichotomy. Either you’re a “denier” or an “alarmist”, with us or against us. But there are many people out there that fall into a different category we can call the “lukewarmers“. The lukewarmers are on board with what we have learned from data and theory. They recognize the robust findings that the Earth is warming, and that most of the change can be attributed to CO2 emissions. However, they don’t believe that the consequences of global warming qualify as “dangerous”. In spite of my own feelings on the issue, I find this growing opinion to be a positive development.
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.
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