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
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.
The Sahel is a particularly sensitive region with respect to the effects of global warming. The Sahel has been plagued by decadal-ish periods of drought, such as in the 1980’s. It’s generally understood that the variations in Sahel rainfall are mostly attributable to ocean variability (Giannini et al. 2003), but there are still many questions about the importance of other natural and anthropogenic factors. These questions are hard to answer with current climate models, because ocean temperature biases can lead to large differences in the distribution of rainfall. In spite of the lack of agreement between models, this paper was able to identify a robust result across a group of models from the CMIP3 data archive.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to tackle the problem of misinformation in the global warming debate. Shouting matches on the internet just feed the trolls and rarely achieve anything, and people don’t want to read accurate technical, science-y things, so what can we scientists really do? We can’t attack peoples’ character even when they attack ours, because that just makes us look bad, and fuels the global warming denier image of being an “underdog” or an “outsider”. These people are not on a crusade against science, they are just concerned (and a bit paranoid).
Global warming deniers are people too.
One of the many ongoing internal debates I have with myself is how to best combat ignorant climate skeptics. It is a never-ending task that can feel like wasted effort. I would argue that it’s actually much easier for skeptics to spread misinformation than it is for actual scientists to explain how the climate system works. This problem boils down to two key issues. Continue reading
I recently made some updates to my Atlantic Tropical Cyclone page. I cleaned up the look a bit, but more importantly I finished creating some visualizations for comparing the seasonal evolution of the environmental conditions in the main development region (MDR). Continue reading
This probably one of the driest topics I could write about, but I’ve changed my system a lot over the last year and it has had some notable advantages. I wish someone had told me how cluttered my files were going to get when I started in science! So hopefully this post will get other people thinking more “long term” about their file organization. Continue reading
A “pointer”, in computer science terms, is an object that references a place in memory. This differs from a variable or an array, because a pointer does not have a type or size that changes. This allows some useful things that are impossible with regular arrays, such as having an array of pointers where each element points to an array of a different size. I recently found a nifty trick in NCL that provide a similar advantage.
I’ve been a Microsoft Word user for a long time, and overall it’s a really great piece of software in many respects. However, there are a few small issues that are starting to bug me more and more as time goes on. Continue reading
Someone made a link to my blog in the comments of this recent article about the congressional science committee reaction to a paper by Karl et al. (2015) in the journal Science which claims that the hiatus never really occurred based on new bias corrections in the data. The corrections primarily dealt with weighting buoy data over ship intake water for ocean temperature measurements. But a quote in this other article by Naomi Oreskes got me thinking that questions about the existence of the “hiatus” are actually bad ones to ask. Continue reading