sokolow

In short: “no”

Well that was more impressive than I was expecting.  Blew up along the boundary right overhead, 0.35” so far

Popup, stationary heavy hailer dropping shooter marbles onto ALEK’s backyard

Three

A Chicago weather story in three pictures

 

One

 

Two

 

Following our dismal winter afterparty and a beautiful Chicago spring day, the bulk of next week looks to be a big pile of raw garbage for anyone who works outside

Snow mixing in on Chicago’s near South Side

classic.

 

18 minutes ago, Chicago WX said:

Pretty much everything around here is closed. As it should be. I think I'm pretty prepared, have certainly worked in really cold weather before, but tomorrow (and Thursday AM) is a totally different animal...

I least hope your role is public safety, infrastructure, or life critical

For Weds 1/30 I will take lo -30 for a nice round number and to one-up Hoosier and a hi of -20 for crank-to-eleven levels of raw suffering freezepocalpyse

ALEK still MIA? havent seen jonger around either :/

 

if anyone still crosses paths with either tell sokolow says hi

For IMBY and surrounding personally am split on whether 3”-5” of snow trailing to crappy near freezing rain vs. 6” plus pure snow — followed by getting thrown into deep freeze for the rest of the week — which of those options blows our projects to hell worse

 

Probably the former is worse

I am so proud of my local forecast office because every dang little infographic and powerpoint slide they put out on everything from “weird clouds” to “life hazardous blizzard chaos” shows that somewhere, some trained weather professional is striving not just to have a forecast that verifies but also to make it meaningfully actionable for idiots like me.

1 hour ago, hickory said:

Look I just wish our goverment would spend more on science than defense. Imagine what we could do with half of the defense budget. 

To be sure I would be heartened if we were to increase NOAA’s budget by say, the flyaway cost of 10 F-35s per year, and to be sure it is worthwhile to continue to strive for 120 or 168 or 192 hours of reliable warning rather than 96, 72, or 48-36. But Derecho! is right that sciencewise the forecasting is amazing; what probably most needs attention is our social and civic infrastructure in terms of preparedness & anticipating climatologically plausible emergencies generally and for acting on the warnings we do get for specific imminent hazards.

last few weeks has been living hell workwise with the swamplike humidity in the low lying semi-flooded area where our current project is taking place. would summarize as “sweat-salt crusted suffering.” had to reread Under The Red Sea Sun by edward ellsberg to regain perspective. today was not just nice but paradise in comparison

 

headed up to near jonger’s neck of the mitten in a couple of ten days to catch some early fall in dune & grapevine country. looking forward to it, hope our current pattern holds

time for the miraculous and all-too brief period where the weather in chicagoland and joshua tree NP coincide (not in searing oven or torrential freezing downpour way)

On 4/15/2018 at 10:06 AM, sokolow said:

Has anyone read The Man Who Caught the Storm, and if so do you have an opinion about it?

I finished this book, and I’m not part of anything skywarn or stormchasing related, so I have no basis to judge the level of accuracy, detail, sensitivity, or critical reflection the author brings to Tim Samaras’ life & legacy in particular or the complex motivations scientific and otherwise that drive researchers and amateurs to participate in what is an inherently dangerous but compelling endeavor in general.

 

I enjoyed it but I think those of you with the right kind of background would enjoy it more and have more to say about it.

Has anyone read The Man Who Caught the Storm, and if so do you have an opinion about it?

Outlook thru to Thursday 30s-40s, maybe bumping 50 midweek. Crappy sn/rain chances every day. Continuing the trend of worst weather, miserable working conditions.

really would like a workweek above freezing

Really interesting read; thanks for the write-ups & thanks for the bump!

FYI if you don't have access to an academic library with journal access, your local public library likely will. They can get most of these articles for free via inter library loan. Open access is preferable, but the access is attainable with a minimum amount of legwork for almost everyone as it stands.

You have to understand that this system is a relic from a time before the internet. Its easy to publish an entirely electric publication without much overhead, but that wasn't the case when journals were actual paper journals with no other means of distribution. The research is paid for by grants, but the publication/review costs have to be covered as well.

Most reviewers (and many editors!) for most journals don't get paid. No-one I know has been paid as a referee or a reviewer. Probably we all know but never really say out loud good review is incredibly time consuming specialist work that requires a person to simultaneously carry out the most brutal attacks on someone's work you can think of while simultaneously imagining & suggesting constructive ways those critiques might be answered. How many reviewers can do that, or choose to, or have the time to? Even complying with quality metrics to figure that out in a standardized way would be a giant timesuck pain in the a$$.

Too, most papers get two, maybe three referees. The referees are bought into trying to deconstruct what might be an elaborate interdisciplinary and multi-method analysis by several authors who are each deploying his or her expert training in novel ways. A stunning amount of peer review manages to totally miss blatant errors because two sets of eyes working in their spare time (anonymously & apart from their own research) are not sufficient. It wouldn't be possible to have peer review full stop if people actually charged consulting rates that reflected their training; it's almost neccessary that it's mostly volunteer work donated in the name of science & scholarship.

The editorial staff of journals and journal services add a lot of value -- but a huge chunk of the value is straightup dealing with vast numbers of document pages, basic quality control, managing the metadata, getting all the text & figures & citations into a common format, and corralling a months long communication & revision process between authors and their reviewers. I know a guy whose sole job it is to fix shoddy figures and graphics submitted by actual big -S scientists leading multimillion dollar labs. Some of which graphics are constructed from improperly used clip art, textbook figures, and GIS results they don't own the rights to.

Re: access the practical test IMO is that access is attainable but every man and woman reading threads like the ECS or FSU tornado study who wants to participate has to haul down to the library and ILL / dl the pdf for themselves -- even on a huge forum full of weather nerds, how many people can do that, and how does that change the timeframe for discusison? Unless there's an open discussion copy, or that its been unlocked. Fair use limits the kind of sharing we can do without getting the board (any board) in trouble.

Looking for an update could just as we.l unleash a back and forth argument on what the right summary is for what's going on. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Try the BAMS yearly state of the climate summary or the monthly summary via the NCDC

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams-state-of-the-climate/

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/

If you care about glaciers & land ice its the WGMS bulletin

http://www.wgms.ch/gmbb.html

http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2014/07/19/alpine-glaciers-bams-state-of-the-climate-2013/

With a recent global field state of field survey in:

Quaternary Science Reviews

Volume 28, Issues 21–22, Pages 2021-2238 (October 2009)

Holocene and Latest Pleistocene Alpine Glacier Fluctuations: A Global Perspective

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02773791/28/21

Moving the OHC banter to the banter zone

That's a good statement. The genesis of AGW hypothesis was probably 90% "pushing" of global temps, via the climate models. Back in the 80's, very little was mentioned as heat potentially being "stored" in the oceans....well.....until the temps flattened out and then we were introduced to the phrase "....in the pipeline.."........Where was this potential pipeline when they were pushing the climate model progs. showing accelerating warming, virtually unabated???

I guess I'd thought Rossby put that on the table before he died, in advance of IGY 57-58 -- shows up all the time via the two bullet points that get quoted around from "Current Problems in Meteorology"

i am incredibly impressed by imminent solar parity and i look forward to the major utilities tanking one by one as the ratepayer defection spiral takea hold