I just had a conversation with Phil Klotzbach (who by no means endorses this post) about, among other things, the life and legacy of Bill Gray who died three years ago yesterday (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Gray) .  I didn’t know Bill Gray except as the emeritus professor who showed up to seminars at Colorado State with a back pillow and a lot of questions.  That is to say, I didn’t know him personally.  But I did try to appreciate his scientific perspective as a student, and I still try to today.  Bill Gray had an unbelievable intuition based on decades of experience for how the tropical atmosphere works.  Bill Gray was also a noted climate change skeptic which is a considerable shame.  He will clearly go down on the wrong end of that.  Where I think Bill probably deserves to be heard is on his criticism that many of us today who study the atmosphere have a profound lack of appreciation for the messiness of real world meteorology.  Just because a one-month mean map implies that anomalous high pressure existed somewhere doesn’t mean that high pressure existed in that place every day that month.  I often hear Bill yelling at me in the back of my mind when I use a mean sounding to initialize a convective simulation.  Did the conditions implied by the mean DYNAMO sounding every actually occur during DYNAMO?  I don’t know.  And, I’ve never looked.  I’ll go down on the wrong end of that one.