sleet_spotter

No. These are both explicitly addressed in the article.

This is so lovely. I desperately wish I could color code all math!!

If you are curious to know more about Dolly, I wholeheartedly recommend the podcast series “Dolly Parton’s America”. One of the best podcast series I’ve listened to and gave me so much respect for Dolly. The world is a little dimmer without her in it!

The fires being large enough to create their own thunderstorms is a proxy for intensity, hence the significance.

Peer review is still very relevant in climate science. But given it is from well-respected authors, I am more inclined to trust the results at this stage.

Well, if one had enough time and resources, this would make for an interesting metric. Could it figure it out with cut-off of 1900? If so, what about 1899? 1898? What context from the marginal year was key to the change in outcome?

FYI there is a long-standing bug with ProMotion and switching spaces. Their length is tied to refresh rate somehow. Switching to static 60hz makes them faster (but what an annoying choice to have to make!)

I’m not sure if you are intentionally trying to miss the point. The comment was claiming they are obligated by law to support media they don’t agree with. We are all equivalently obligated by law to not steal or commit other crimes. We pay taxes. They are part of the contract of our society. What our representatives decide to spend them on doesn’t change that.

While I sympathize with the feeling, it’s a stretch to say “obligated by law”. You pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend. We elect them to speak and choose on our behalf. It isn’t a “loophole” when this runs afoul of an individual’s values. It is simply that we have a representative government that makes decisions by majority votes. I don’t agree with most defense spending, but I acknowledge that a majority of this country wants it. This is the purpose of compromise. If there had been a good-faith proposal to reform CPB [1], we could have made it better. The collateral damage from destroying the good parts (e.g., PBS) due to our failure to compromise should not be celebrated. [1] Such a proposal isn’t hard to imagine. A key purpose of local stations is to give a platform to the voices of local people. Simply shifting funding from national programming to local programming (without changing the total) would have accomplished this “debiasing” and empowered the (tragically endangered) local news.

NSF also uses expert panels to recommend grants for funding. The systems are very similar.

This is a helpful way to think about it. Though, is the problem of having an incomplete definition the same as lacking a unique name? Maybe the solutions are different, and the author points out that made-up names don't cut it. Is it instead more of a catch-22 situation?

The other dimension implied here is the timing of when variety is introduced. If all the options were known when the system was originally designed, the issue may have been more clear. So then the other problem is that, when the need to distinguish between cases first came up, the solution was designed for only 2 cases. And if there were only ever those two cases, the solution presented would probably be the most efficient.

The solution to this incremental scope problem is a lot less clear to me and something I struggle with personally in scientific computing projects. When variety #2 pops up, how does one decide whether to restructure everything in case of a variety #3, or take the quicker (potentially more efficient) path and avoid unnecessary complexity? Assuming I've done as much as I can to anticipate and constrain my needed functionality. It somehow feels like I end up losing either way.

As someone in grad school for related topics, this stuff will undoubtedly surpass physical weather models (climate change is a different story). As I chart my own research direction, I wonder what kinds of problems meteorology will still be working on in a few decades? AI models like this will render many physical models obsolete. And with the leaps made recently by cube satellites and other remote sensing tech, direct observations may soon no longer be sparse. So what does that leave? Understanding the physical principles? Yes, and doing so will augment these advances. But what else? And what kind of applied problems could the physical principles solve? At some point, AI weather forecasts may cross the threshold of being "good enough" for 99% of use cases. I don't doubt that there is much more important science to be done (I recall someone famously claiming science was "done" in the 1800s), but admittedly it takes some creative thought to imagine. The field will have to evolve. I don't know if it is possible to know how it will evolve before it does. Just something I wonder about.

Also, I certainly don't mean to detract from this achievement . This is great work and it is truly awesome to see these kinds of leaps. There is plenty of vanity in science and the urge for self-preservation, but such advances in weather forecasting will save so many lives and do a lot of good in the world. I wholeheartedly cheer on the scientists behind this work and am excited to see what is around the corner.

Pre-industrial CO2 concentration is synonymous with the "natural concentration", at least in the recent past. We made a very large change that has thrown Earth's systems out of equilibrium. Returning to pre-industrial CO2 levels would undo that change and bring things back towards equilibrium.

I'm not totally sure how systems work for drilling this deep, but typically ice core setups attach the coring apparatus to the surface via a cable that is spooled by a winch. The cable itself ends up being the heaviest part of the system.