Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 8)

This is an outstanding perspective from AMS: A Better Starting Point for Science and Society: Relationship vs. Transaction – AMS Headlines .  The author nicely articulates some ideas that I’ve never felt fully capable of writing down.

I’ll update this post when the manuscript is in press at QJ.

I’m really excited about recent work done by then-undergraduate Sam Wu detailing the dynamics of raindrop motion.  For me, this project answers questions I had as far back as 2006.  We typically treat raindrops as horizontal tracers of the wind, that then fall at their terminal fall speed, and that “load” the air.  But this treatment is too simple.  While the air-drop mixture presents an odd physical system, it is not impossible to deal with.  External forces act on the center of mass of the combined system.  Easy.  The hard bit (dare I say “rub”?) is the internal force from friction — but this is where the fun lies.  I’ve made it my goal for 20 years to kill “loading”.  Did I succeed?  You’ll have to read the paper (oh…and the follow-up paper in 2027) to find out.

As always, thanks to reviewers of the manuscript.

It’s been a long time coming, but the first DoNUT papers are out:

Full article: Idealised cumulus cloud-scale motions and the dynamics of isolated and coupled flows

And

Full article: Numerical assessment of advective and diffusive dynamics of interacting and isolated prototypical convectively initiated circulations

Basic story: vorticity dynamics represents a great way to treat cloudy circulations as real fluid flows.

The extreme heat in the US southwest in March made national news for 2 weeks, so I’m not breaking a story here.  But, I wanted to point out some things from the Sacramento climate report for the month that I think are remarkable.

1. [Middle lines] We set high temperature records on ten consecutive days!  Plus, we set two more.  That means that 1/3 of all high temperature records were set in a single year.  There was a bit of “luck” in there to be sure, but it’s still wild.  As a fun bonus, the red lines make an exclamation point.
2. [Left-most lines] The mean high for the month was +12F over the normal mean.
3. [Right-most Line] Not only did we receive merely 5% of our mean precipitation, but also it all came on the very last day of the month.  So, we were less than 24 hours from receiving no rainfall for the entire month of March, one of only five months in which we may normally reasonably expect significant rainfall.

Here’s your bi-annual reminder that almost everyone (from textbooks to infographics) fails to correctly explain the seasons: https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/what-even-is-the-spring-equinox-and-what-does-it-mean/vi-AA1Z0a78?ocid=socialshare .  It’s a 3D problem which makes accurately discussing it on a 2D infographic hard, but it’s far from impossible.

My work deals a lot with 3D geometry.  Because I am seeing this more and more in published papers, I wanted to point something out.  This is an image from the Wikipedia page on the ‘torus’.  Notice the red arrow is the ‘poloidal’ direction.  This direction has almost invariably been called the ‘toroidal’ direction in the meteorology literature.  That’s simply wrong.  It matters because we might reasonably be concerned with the toroidal direction in many flows (I’m thinking of hurricanes).  So, let’s get it right.

I’ve posted about this broad idea before.  Here in the Central Valley, the transition from summer to winter happens very fast.  And, it happens in October.  What I think is especially cool about October is that the ‘Normal High” for the first of the month is the same as the ‘Record High’ for the last of the month.  The ‘Record High’ drops over 20 degrees from 10/2 to 10/28.  Neat.

Good question.  I don’t know, but an ex-group member does.  Click to find out

Quick congratulations to our graduating seniors in the atmospheric science and applied physics majors in the class of 2025.  Thanks for all your hard work across your ATM classes.  Good luck.

I received an email the other day from the Zeiss Planetarium Bochum.  Staff recently celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Planetarium with a big party.  The institute’s lead artistic director baked a cake that was meant to look like something called a ‘meat hedgehog’.  It’s usually a German dish made of pork constructed to look like a hedgehog.  Because German’s love their compound words, ‘meat hedgehog’ is ‘mettigel’.  Naturally, this meant that the cake version needed a punny name.  Hence, I received the following picture from the Planetarium.

Congratulations to the Planetarium Bochum on 60 years.