Spring Banter 2021

[rclab]

1 hour ago, MJO812 said:

I miss winter 

Good morning, Anthony. In anticipation of the first NYC 90 degree day I can understand. For some of us at the stage we are at/in, winter is the only season left for us to look forward to. Stay well and enjoy the sun, warmth and listen to the rain. As always .....

[uncle W]

the winter is just a memory...as the seasons come and go it gets faster when you get older...October will be here almost as fast as you can say it...

[LibertyBell]

On 5/19/2021 at 10:58 AM, Will - Rutgers said:

there's a rock dove at work who made its nest right above a doorway, i saw this morning one of the eggs had fallen out and cracked, very sad.

whats the difference between a rock dove and the regular pigeons we see

 

[uncle W]

11 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

whats the difference between a rock dove and the regular pigeons we see

 

a rock dove has long hair...nyuk nyuk nyuk...

[LibertyBell]

1 hour ago, uncle W said:

a rock dove has long hair...nyuk nyuk nyuk...

I miss the 3 stooges!  Curly had the most amazing hair

 

[etudiant]

On 5/19/2021 at 9:30 PM, Will - Rutgers said:

oddly enough it's using the same nest it did last year although i didn't see it through most of fall and all of winter.

You're lucky, I've never found a pigeon nest in the wild, although there must be zillions around here in NYC.

But I am surprised the nest survived the winter, must be in a good spot that makes it worth reusing.

 

[uncle W]

45 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

I miss the 3 stooges!  Curly had the most amazing hair

 

 

[LibertyBell]

4 hours ago, etudiant said:

You're lucky, I've never found a pigeon nest in the wild, although there must be zillions around here in NYC.

But I am surprised the nest survived the winter, must be in a good spot that makes it worth reusing.

 

I've seen pigeons in the Poconos, they look really out of place there

 

[forkyfork]

imagine if we had gotten this pattern in february

[LibertyBell]

31 minutes ago, forkyfork said:

imagine if we had gotten this pattern in february

I thought we did and thats why we had so much snow?

 

[SRRTA22]

SPC issued a marginal risk for NYC 

Looks meh but we usually get good storms in marginal set ups haha

 

 

[CIK62]

FINAL OFFICIAL OUTLOOK FOR SUMMER 2021

 

 

[bluewave]

https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/15/a-i-model-shows-promise-to-generate-faster-more-accurate-weather-forecasts/

December 15, 2020

A.I. model shows promise to generate faster, more accurate weather forecasts 

Hannah Hickey

UW News

Today’s weather forecasts come from some of the most powerful computers on Earth. The huge machines churn through millions of calculations to solve equations to predict temperature, wind, rainfall and other weather events. A forecast’s combined need for speed and accuracy taxes even the most modern computers.

The future could take a radically different approach. A collaboration between the University of Washington and Microsoft Research shows how artificial intelligence can analyze past weather patterns to predict future events, much more efficiently and potentially someday more accurately than today’s technology.

The newly developed global weather model bases its predictions on the past 40 years of weather data, rather than on detailed physics calculations. The simple, data-based A.I. model can simulate a year’s weather around the globe much more quickly and almost as well as traditional weather models, by taking similar repeated steps from one forecast to the next, according to a paper published this summer in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.

“Machine learning is essentially doing a glorified version of pattern recognition,” said lead author Jonathan Weyn, who did the research as part of his UW doctorate in atmospheric sciences. “It sees a typical pattern, recognizes how it usually evolves and decides what to do based on the examples it has seen in the past 40 years of data.”

Although the new model is, unsurprisingly, less accurate than today’s top traditional forecasting models, the current A.I. design uses about 7,000 times less computing power to create forecasts for the same number of points on the globe. Less computational work means faster results.

That speedup would allow the forecasting centers to quickly run many models with slightly different starting conditions, a technique called “ensemble forecasting” that lets weather predictions cover the range of possible expected outcomes for a weather event – for instance, where a hurricane might strike.

“There’s so much more efficiency in this approach; that’s what’s so important about it,” said author Dale Durran, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences. “The promise is that it could allow us to deal with predictability issues by having a model that’s fast enough to run very large ensembles.”

Co-author Rich Caruana at Microsoft Research had initially approached the UW group to propose a project using artificial intelligence to make weather predictions based on historical data without relying on physical laws. Weyn was taking a UW computer science course in machine learning and decided to tackle the project.

“After training on past weather data, the A.I. algorithm is capable of coming up with relationships between different variables that physics equations just can’t do,” Weyn said. “We can afford to use a lot fewer variables and therefore make a model that’s much faster.”

To merge successful A.I. techniques with weather forecasting, the team mapped six faces of a cube onto planet Earth, then flattened out the cube’s six faces, like in an architectural paper model. The authors treated the polar faces differently because of their unique role in the weather as one way to improve the forecast’s accuracy.

The authors then tested their model by predicting the global height of the 500 hectopascal pressure, a standard variable in weather forecasting, every 12 hours for a full year. A recent paper, which included Weyn as a co-author, introduced WeatherBench as a benchmark test for data-driven weather forecasts. On that forecasting test, developed for three-day forecasts, this new model is one of the top performers.

The data-driven model would need more detail before it could begin to compete with existing operational forecasts, the authors say, but the idea shows promise as an alternative approach to generating weather forecasts, especially with a growing amount of previous forecasts and weather observations.

Weyn is now a data scientist with Microsoft’s weather and finance division. This research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and a Department of Defense graduate fellowship.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-ai-can-make-weather-forecasting-less-cloudy-11617566400

Sid Boukabara, principal scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Center for Satellite Applications and Research, thinks those gains will be significant. “For certain components, it could be 10 times more efficient to 1,000 times more efficient.” But it is too early to know how much this will enhance the accuracy of numerical weather prediction as a whole.

For instance, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts currently simulates the globe as a grid of squares that are 9 kilometers on a side (roughly 5 miles) and stacked 137 layers up into the atmosphere. Deputy Director Peter Bauer says each step up in detail requires an exponential increase in electricity: The center’s newest supercomputer in Bologna, Italy, will consume as much power as 6,000 households. He and his colleagues are quickly approaching the limits of what they can afford or justify, he says.

This year—relying on AI methods to boost efficiency—the center will begin developing a new global model at a 1-kilometer resolution that will bring storms and oceanic eddies into better focus, says Dr. Bauer. “Bigger and faster machines give us ever greater computing power, but we need to radically change the code we run on them to be able to use them effectively.”

[SnoSki14]

20 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

I thought we did and thats why we had so much snow?

 

Things kinda crapped out after that big snowstorm though we still got some nice moderate snow events. 

[Nibor]

1 hour ago, Will - Rutgers said:

vaccination has really done a number on COVID infections, new US cases should be below 10,000/day within weeks if trends continue.  the US hasn't seen <10,000 cases/day since March 22, 2020.  this guy gets his second Moderna shot tomorrow and i cannot wait.

Moderna Gang represent. 

[MJO812]

RIP James aka USCAPEWEATHERAF). He was from SNE .

I just found out the news and I am in shock. We were supposed to hang out this summer. I met James on zoom during the SNE chat.

31 is way too young . He had alot of passion for weather.

 

[donsutherland1]

4 hours ago, MJO812 said:

RIP James aka USCAPEWEATHERAF). He was from SNE .

I just found out the news and I am in shock. We were supposed to hang out this summer. I met James on zoom during the SNE chat.

31 is way too young . He had alot of passion for weather.

 

This is terrible news. May he R.I.P.

[gravitylover]

Wow. RIP Any indication of how he passed? 31 is way too young.

[IrishRob17]

52 minutes ago, gravitylover said:

Wow. RIP Any indication of how he passed? 31 is way too young.

There’s a thread dedicated to him on the New England side of the board, it was COVID. 

[STORMANLI]

Anyone for The Beatles'

" Here Comes The Sun" ?

Or Johnny Depp's line from

Pirates Of The Caribbean"

" Now, bring me that horizon"  ?

[Rjay]

Robins keep destroying my garden.  **** them.  

[LibertyBell]

2 hours ago, Rjay said:

Robins keep destroying my garden.  **** them.  

Because they eat worms?

 

[rclab]

3 hours ago, Rjay said:

Robins keep destroying my garden.  **** them.  

Good evening Rjay. I wouldn’t be surprised if forky led a multitude of our red breasted friends in a rousing rendition of ‘Rockin Robin’, while canceling your garden.. As always .......

[Dan76]

57 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

Because they eat worms?

 

I was watching 2 today in my back yard listing to eating worms/bugs  in the grass pretty cool

[IrishRob17]

12 hours ago, Rjay said:

Robins keep destroying my garden.  **** them.  

What are they going after?  We have something that keeps eating the black cherry tomato plant and aside from a couple nibbles at another cherry tomato plant leaves everything else alone, which is odd. My wife saw a bird in there at one point but couldn’t identify it quick enough. I’m thinking if it was a rabbit, groundhog, chipmunk, etc more than just the one plant would be gone. 

[Rjay]

3 hours ago, IrishRob17 said:

What are they going after?  We have something that keeps eating the black cherry tomato plant and aside from a couple nibbles at another cherry tomato plant leaves everything else alone, which is odd. My wife saw a bird in there at one point but couldn’t identify it quick enough. I’m thinking if it was a rabbit, groundhog, chipmunk, etc more than just the one plant would be gone. 

They're pecking off fully bloomed flowers.  And they broke 3 of my plants at their base. 

[STORMANLI]

Last year Mockingbirds drilled holes in many of my tomatoes.

[LibertyBell]

8 hours ago, Rjay said:

They're pecking off fully bloomed flowers.  And they broke 3 of my plants at their base. 

Time to put some netting on those plants.....  They need to stick to worms.

 

 

[LibertyBell]

1 hour ago, STORMANLI said:

Last year Mockingbirds drilled holes in many of my tomatoes.

wtf.  I thought those peckerheads only ate insects and worms?  I have a lot of them too.  Cover everything up with netting

 

[STORMANLI]

Yes, that's the plan. Used what little I could get last year on cabbage. White flies.