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.
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