Spring Banter 2021

[rclab]

On 5/12/2021 at 2:00 PM, LibertyBell said:

do you chase them or do they chase you?

 

It won’t matter, Liberty, if they think Forky is a sycamore. As always.....

[rclab]

14 hours ago, MJO812 said:

I miss winter

 At least, Anthony, you get it back in a little over six months. Many of us will never get back what we truly miss. As always ....

[STORMANLI]

48 minutes ago, rclab said:

 At least, Anthony, you get it back in a little over six months. Many of us will never get back what we truly miss. As always ....

Not on this side of eternity, but one day...

[donsutherland1]

Does anyone know if there are website issues with the NWS point-and-click site for New York City? This is the 3rd consecutive day that the afternoon figure is far off what is likely and what is already occurring.

Yesterday, when I tried to view the preliminary daily climate summary, there was an error retrieving it. Later on, it worked fine. I'm not sure if the issue I encountered yesterday is part of a larger issue that is preventing or delaying the timely updates to the point-and-click numbers or a separate unrelated problem with coincidental timing.

[Stormlover74]

14 minutes ago, donsutherland1 said:

Does anyone know if there are website issues with the NWS point-and-click site for New York City? This is the 3rd consecutive day that the afternoon figure is far off what is likely and what is already occurring.

Yesterday, when I tried to view the preliminary daily climate summary, there was an error retrieving it. Later on, it worked fine. I'm not sure if the issue I encountered yesterday is part of a larger issue that is preventing or delaying the timely updates to the point-and-click numbers or a separate unrelated problem with coincidental timing.

Odd it seems to be working fine for me

 

 

[Santa Claus]

16 minutes ago, donsutherland1 said:

Does anyone know if there are website issues with the NWS point-and-click site for New York City?

i am having all kinds of problems with it and additionally i could not access the Mount Holly AFD this morning

[donsutherland1]

57 minutes ago, Stormlover74 said:

Odd it seems to be working fine for me

 

 

Perhaps it was a temporary issue, but it seems to have been occurring at least sporadically during the past few days.

[donsutherland1]

55 minutes ago, Will - Rutgers said:

i am having all kinds of problems with it and additionally i could not access the Mount Holly AFD this morning

Thanks. It seems to be a larger issue than simply an Upton website matter, in that case. Perhaps the Eastern Region or even NCEP was having issues.

[stemwinder]

On 5/12/2021 at 12:13 PM, forkyfork said:

i'm going cicada chasing this weekend 

They are already emerging here in W. Windsor.  Saw a few today, for the first time.  Enjoy.

[Santa Claus]

there's a rock dove at work who made its nest right above a doorway, i saw this morning one of the eggs had fallen out and cracked, very sad.

[etudiant]

9 hours ago, Will - Rutgers said:

there's a rock dove at work who made its nest right above a doorway, i saw this morning one of the eggs had fallen out and cracked, very sad.

Rock doves operate on the Facebook principle, move fast and break things. So they make cursory quick nests and hurry to get the kids out on their own, then go on to the next nest.

There is probably a bestselling business strategy book in there somewhere. 

[Santa Claus]

1 hour ago, etudiant said:

Rock doves operate on the Facebook principle, move fast and break things. So they make cursory quick nests and hurry to get the kids out on their own, then go on to the next nest.

There is probably a bestselling business strategy book in there somewhere. 

oddly enough it's using the same nest it did last year although i didn't see it through most of fall and all of winter.

[MJO812]

I miss winter 

[rclab]

1 hour ago, MJO812 said:

I miss winter 

Good morning, Anthony. In anticipation of the first NYC 90 degree day I can understand. For some of us at the stage we are at/in, winter is the only season left for us to look forward to. Stay well and enjoy the sun, warmth and listen to the rain. As always .....

[uncle W]

the winter is just a memory...as the seasons come and go it gets faster when you get older...October will be here almost as fast as you can say it...

[LibertyBell]

On 5/19/2021 at 10:58 AM, Will - Rutgers said:

there's a rock dove at work who made its nest right above a doorway, i saw this morning one of the eggs had fallen out and cracked, very sad.

whats the difference between a rock dove and the regular pigeons we see

 

[uncle W]

11 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

whats the difference between a rock dove and the regular pigeons we see

 

a rock dove has long hair...nyuk nyuk nyuk...

[LibertyBell]

1 hour ago, uncle W said:

a rock dove has long hair...nyuk nyuk nyuk...

I miss the 3 stooges!  Curly had the most amazing hair

 

[etudiant]

On 5/19/2021 at 9:30 PM, Will - Rutgers said:

oddly enough it's using the same nest it did last year although i didn't see it through most of fall and all of winter.

You're lucky, I've never found a pigeon nest in the wild, although there must be zillions around here in NYC.

But I am surprised the nest survived the winter, must be in a good spot that makes it worth reusing.

 

[uncle W]

45 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

I miss the 3 stooges!  Curly had the most amazing hair

 

 

[Santa Claus]

2 hours ago, etudiant said:

You're lucky, I've never found a pigeon nest in the wild, although there must be zillions around here in NYC.

But I am surprised the nest survived the winter, must be in a good spot that makes it worth reusing.

 

it’s on a wall pack light right above the back entrance of my building, people use it all the time but she don’t care.

also the light has those anti-bird spikes which, instead of keeping it away, have given her +5 defense.  very smart tactical move by the dove.

[LibertyBell]

4 hours ago, etudiant said:

You're lucky, I've never found a pigeon nest in the wild, although there must be zillions around here in NYC.

But I am surprised the nest survived the winter, must be in a good spot that makes it worth reusing.

 

I've seen pigeons in the Poconos, they look really out of place there

 

[forkyfork]

imagine if we had gotten this pattern in february

[LibertyBell]

31 minutes ago, forkyfork said:

imagine if we had gotten this pattern in february

I thought we did and thats why we had so much snow?

 

[SRRTA22]

SPC issued a marginal risk for NYC 

Looks meh but we usually get good storms in marginal set ups haha

 

 

[CIK62]

FINAL OFFICIAL OUTLOOK FOR SUMMER 2021

 

 

[bluewave]

https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/15/a-i-model-shows-promise-to-generate-faster-more-accurate-weather-forecasts/

December 15, 2020

A.I. model shows promise to generate faster, more accurate weather forecasts 

Hannah Hickey

UW News

Today’s weather forecasts come from some of the most powerful computers on Earth. The huge machines churn through millions of calculations to solve equations to predict temperature, wind, rainfall and other weather events. A forecast’s combined need for speed and accuracy taxes even the most modern computers.

The future could take a radically different approach. A collaboration between the University of Washington and Microsoft Research shows how artificial intelligence can analyze past weather patterns to predict future events, much more efficiently and potentially someday more accurately than today’s technology.

The newly developed global weather model bases its predictions on the past 40 years of weather data, rather than on detailed physics calculations. The simple, data-based A.I. model can simulate a year’s weather around the globe much more quickly and almost as well as traditional weather models, by taking similar repeated steps from one forecast to the next, according to a paper published this summer in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.

“Machine learning is essentially doing a glorified version of pattern recognition,” said lead author Jonathan Weyn, who did the research as part of his UW doctorate in atmospheric sciences. “It sees a typical pattern, recognizes how it usually evolves and decides what to do based on the examples it has seen in the past 40 years of data.”

Although the new model is, unsurprisingly, less accurate than today’s top traditional forecasting models, the current A.I. design uses about 7,000 times less computing power to create forecasts for the same number of points on the globe. Less computational work means faster results.

That speedup would allow the forecasting centers to quickly run many models with slightly different starting conditions, a technique called “ensemble forecasting” that lets weather predictions cover the range of possible expected outcomes for a weather event – for instance, where a hurricane might strike.

“There’s so much more efficiency in this approach; that’s what’s so important about it,” said author Dale Durran, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences. “The promise is that it could allow us to deal with predictability issues by having a model that’s fast enough to run very large ensembles.”

Co-author Rich Caruana at Microsoft Research had initially approached the UW group to propose a project using artificial intelligence to make weather predictions based on historical data without relying on physical laws. Weyn was taking a UW computer science course in machine learning and decided to tackle the project.

“After training on past weather data, the A.I. algorithm is capable of coming up with relationships between different variables that physics equations just can’t do,” Weyn said. “We can afford to use a lot fewer variables and therefore make a model that’s much faster.”

To merge successful A.I. techniques with weather forecasting, the team mapped six faces of a cube onto planet Earth, then flattened out the cube’s six faces, like in an architectural paper model. The authors treated the polar faces differently because of their unique role in the weather as one way to improve the forecast’s accuracy.

The authors then tested their model by predicting the global height of the 500 hectopascal pressure, a standard variable in weather forecasting, every 12 hours for a full year. A recent paper, which included Weyn as a co-author, introduced WeatherBench as a benchmark test for data-driven weather forecasts. On that forecasting test, developed for three-day forecasts, this new model is one of the top performers.

The data-driven model would need more detail before it could begin to compete with existing operational forecasts, the authors say, but the idea shows promise as an alternative approach to generating weather forecasts, especially with a growing amount of previous forecasts and weather observations.

Weyn is now a data scientist with Microsoft’s weather and finance division. This research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and a Department of Defense graduate fellowship.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-ai-can-make-weather-forecasting-less-cloudy-11617566400

Sid Boukabara, principal scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Center for Satellite Applications and Research, thinks those gains will be significant. “For certain components, it could be 10 times more efficient to 1,000 times more efficient.” But it is too early to know how much this will enhance the accuracy of numerical weather prediction as a whole.

For instance, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts currently simulates the globe as a grid of squares that are 9 kilometers on a side (roughly 5 miles) and stacked 137 layers up into the atmosphere. Deputy Director Peter Bauer says each step up in detail requires an exponential increase in electricity: The center’s newest supercomputer in Bologna, Italy, will consume as much power as 6,000 households. He and his colleagues are quickly approaching the limits of what they can afford or justify, he says.

This year—relying on AI methods to boost efficiency—the center will begin developing a new global model at a 1-kilometer resolution that will bring storms and oceanic eddies into better focus, says Dr. Bauer. “Bigger and faster machines give us ever greater computing power, but we need to radically change the code we run on them to be able to use them effectively.”

[SnoSki14]

20 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

I thought we did and thats why we had so much snow?

 

Things kinda crapped out after that big snowstorm though we still got some nice moderate snow events. 

[Santa Claus]

vaccination has really done a number on COVID infections, new US cases should be below 10,000/day within weeks if trends continue.  the US hasn't seen <10,000 cases/day since March 22, 2020.  this guy gets his second Moderna shot tomorrow and i cannot wait.

[Nibor]

1 hour ago, Will - Rutgers said:

vaccination has really done a number on COVID infections, new US cases should be below 10,000/day within weeks if trends continue.  the US hasn't seen <10,000 cases/day since March 22, 2020.  this guy gets his second Moderna shot tomorrow and i cannot wait.

Moderna Gang represent.