Funny Weather

All or just one or two NASA models, and how crap, and in what way? And what has American news got to do with accuracy?

Basically, all models are crap, you just have to live with that and understand the models and limitations, but they do often provide a valuable insight to what is happening.

Without models, Jim T would be (probably) out of work in the silicon industry

Martin

[snip]

I don't agree that ALL models are crap... most microchip device models are excellent.

But, for whatever reason, discrete device models seem to be generally lacking in accuracy.

Hardly, I designed chips for twenty-five years before there were (commercially available) simulators.

I still design with my own brain, then verify with a simulator. And I can still stand up to a blackboard and explain WHY a circuit works, without benefit of any simulator aid.

Other than Larkin and Hobbs, I don't think there's anyone else here who can come close.

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
         America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave

Nah, Bored Bum would /could do better......:-)

Agree about The Larkin,but Hobbs, I don't know much about, 'cos I is a pleb

Martin

[snip]

Hobbs is probably #1 ranking in optical electronics.

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
         America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave

The polar ice cap melts, making the oil and gas deposits under the Arctic Ocean more accessible. More gasoline for the Hummer! Woohoo!!

--
Paul Hovnanian     mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
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Programmers don\'t die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.

I've seen his occasional posts here, and just taken him as "an authority" who knows his stuff. It's good to know I was not mistaken :)

Martin

Get this. Read it. Worth it.

John

My experience is that they do a lousy job giving a day-to-day forecast for 10-14 days from today (often even 5 days, sometimes 2). But I do notice they aren't as bad at forecasting what kind of summer and what kind of winter is in store a few months away.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

And around here, sometimes 4 hours.

Yes, the longer-range predictions are pretty good. Winter will be cold. Summer will be hot.

They keep predicting worse-than-average hurricane seasons. One of these years they'll be right.

John

For some reason, I thought that Katrina had pretty much topped the charts.

Thanks, Rich

It wasn't a monster, like Camille in 1969 (cat 5, 200 MPH sustained winds) or the no-name storm that demolished Galveston (and killed

3000-8000 people) in September of 1900, or even Betsy in 1965 (which eye passed over our house). It wasn't even on the worst-case-scenario track that was predicted to demolish New Orleans every 100 years or so. What zapped NOLA was the insane canals that were dug from the gulf and from the lake, into the heart of the city, with pitiful levees and no locks. All on top of a hundred years of subsidance from continuous pumping. Not to mention two hundred years of political incompetance.

Katrina was only a cat3, 125 mph at the coast and less in New Orleans.

John

Some figures for Camille are 190 MPH. The Galveston hurricane was estimated to be 135 MPH, low end of Cat-4. Betsy was a Cat-3 when it hit the Gulf Coast.

Two other parts of Katrina's damaging capability:

1. Especially large size - hurricane force sustained winds over a swath over 200 miles wide.
2. Katrina was moving especially slowly, meaning left side windspeed was closer to the worse right side windspeed. N.O. was on the left side, with the damage-doing winds coming from the north after Lake Ponchartrain endured a lot of time with Cat-3 easterly to northeasterly winds.

However, the 2005 hurricane season is notable for a record high number of named storms, a very high number of hurricanes, a very high number of "major hurricanes", a record high number of Cat-5 hurricanes, and lowest surface-level barometric pressure ever recorded in an "Atlantic Basin" hurricane (Wilma), as well as one of the major hurricanes landfalling with monstrous size and staying a "major hurricane" in windspeed several hours after moving inland and going close to an especially vulnerable major city.

The 2006 and 2007 Atlantic Basin hurricane seasons were predicted to be worse than average but to an extent well short of the 2005 season. 2006 was by most counts slightly below the 1950-2000 average. The 2007 season so far appears to me to be shaping up with fewer hurricanes and fewer "major hurricanes" than the 1950-2000 average, but with number of named storms slightly exceeding the 1950-2000 average and a well-above-average 2 hurricanes achieving Cat-5 status, and a new record of 2 Atlantic Basin hurricanes landfalling with Cat-5 strength in one season. On the mitigating side of the 2007 Atlantic season - size of the storms has appeared to me trending smallish.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

I drove through southern Mississippi, on the broken remains of old highway 90, about 2 weeks after Camille, to visit the Chicita Banana people about an automation project. Entire apartment complexes along the beach were simply gone, scoured to the concrete slabs, taking a couple of hurricane parties with them. One beautiful old plantation house in Gulfport was just floors and roof... everything facing the beach was blown out and you could see straight through. A big freighter was blown almost a mile inland. I owned half of a sailboat that was docked in Gulfport, never seen again.

Betsy passed directly over New Orleans and shut it down for about 3 weeks. The streets were so full of tree limbs that for a week only a beaten footpath was passable. I has a little Honda S90, so I ran errands for people. The Audubon Park golf course was under about 3 feet of water (I know from direct experience) and a lot of the lakefront was flooded, just from the rain.

John

One of the weather outlets (weather.com) keeps predicting rain, pretty much every day in the Fall. They're usually more accurate than the other (accuweather.com). Amazing how that works.

--
  Keith

krw snipped-for-privacy@att.bizzzz posted to sci.electronics.design:

That is why i the NOAA site direct. The radar and radar loop data is wonderfully useful for very short term estimations. And all the Satellite (and loop) date is very useful as well.

The other sites have all that too. For short-term forecasts just expect tomorrow to be exactly like today. It's been shown this strategy is better than meteorologists.

--
  Keith

In article , krw wrote:

My experience in the Philadelphia area:

Accu-Weather, as presented in the local TV broadcast news and the local news radio station, outperforms weather.com and "The Weather Channel" on cable.

Now, a *possible* explanation for discrepancy, besides one of my Accu-Weather experience being from local staff as opposed to who/how/what/why/where is the the Philadelphia area foecast going into a national website.

The Philadelphia area is one that has more need for local forecasters with years of Philadelphia experience. For that matter, a meteorology professor told me that the Philadelphia area is second-worst in the USA to make forecasts for, after south-central Rockies and the very nearby Plains areas. Then again, that was about 24 years ago.

Now, what "acts up" where it blows Philly Forecasts: More than anything else, a lot of winter and early spring storms. Not only massive ones like the Blizzard of 1993 (though that one dumped a foot of snow mostly before 18 hours after a forecast of 4 or so inches of snow and a lot of sleet and rain), or the Blizzard of 1996 (accumulation forecasts kept being upgraded until after a foot of snow was already on the ground), but even worse lesser ones. How this happens: Cape Hatteras is where the warm Gulf Stream, the cool Labrador Current, and land meet. Storms approaching that point can change course a bit when they hit that point. Furthermore, this point is an area that is in a prime area for "lee side cyclogenesis", shortly downwind of the highest part of the Appalachians. New storms and "secondary storms" form there a lot. And these new young or newly rejuvenated storms, in their early hours, can deviate somewhat from the best computer model forecasts available even now - in path, intensity, and temperature patterns. And when a typical extratropical low has its surface center at or just north or northeast of Cape Hatteras, "the storm has already started" in Philadelphia! Most of the steady precipitation from an extratropical storm is north of the surface low pressure center, mostly over 200 miles to the north for a youthful or newly rejuvenated storm. And in a winter storm in this area going northeastward, most of the snow is usually something like 100 to 250 miles NW of the surface low's path - farther east typically less snow as opposed to sleet/rain.

Just east of the "Front Range" of the Rockies is another area for "lee side cyclogenesis". Denver and many other notable localities of Colorado are sometimes (maybe often) in the snow area of a storm with a surface center forming or re-forming in SE-CO, NE-NM, western OK Panhandle, NW or W Texas Panhandle, or SW Kansas. The storm can "get its act together" shortly after the twice-a-day launching of the weather balloons (noon and midnight Greenwich Mean Time), and the new/renewed storm could become well-known as a result of the next twice-a-day weather baloon launch and good forecasts on it are a few hours after that - sometimes something like halfway through the storm's impact on many more-populated and more-visited localities in/near "Front Range Area" of Colorado! That is a prime area for complaints of "I am shoveling a foot of flurries/partly-cloudy/rain"! Mid-Atlantic area, especially "Northeast Corridor" from NYC to Wash-DC (and associated suburbs to eastern edge of "PA Amish area"/"PA 'Dutch'/'Deutsch' area") and coastal areas from Fire Island NY to Rehoboth Beach DE (maybe Ocean City MD) is the #2 "bad weather forecast area", maybe #1 when weighted by population density. These two areas benefit from meteorologists seasoned by many years of local experience. I mean ones who look at the sky a lot in addition to looking at how local part of national forecasts compare to what happens and checking into what goes wrongt and how. Sometimes when a storm is in an early stage of deviating from a computer-generated forecast that normally has a lot of weight, there signs of "What Actually Is About To Occur" in the sky or in localized areas of where the various computer forecast models disagree - and if there is a pattern of disagreements of forecast models impacting a specific area, I expect that meteorologists who call such impacted area their neighborhood are more likely to know what the relevant and what the irrelevant are in terms of discrepancies in the various computer forecast "models".

Nationwide American weather forecasting firms be advised: There are major localized hotspots of American being "intemperate" as in "temperate" being a word like "flammable" - "flammable" is "inflammable" and likewise "temperate" is "intemperate", and the "temperate zone" is where the weather has a temper! Don't do cost-cutting moves that cut meat in addition to fat in terms of expertise of the local experts of "more significant ground zero areas" of hotspots of American weather having a temper (or where the warning signs of forecasts going wrong are most visible to local experts)!

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)