Hungarian Scientist Sites

This continues reporting on my pilgrimage to sites associated with famed Hungarian/Hungarian-American scientists. Last year's visit is covered in the Budapest Gymnasiums post. At the end of last year's post was my intent to visit the site of the former Minta Gymnasium. Today it is an elementary school, the Trefort School of the ELTE University. Founded as a high school (gymnasium) by Theodore von Karman's father, the school emphasized hands-on, students-discovering-things-for-themselves learning. Edward Teller, who was 20-some years younger than Theodore von Karman, was also a student at the Minta Gymnasium.

The school is on a very short street, Trefort utca. In fact the school building occcupies about half the length of the street. It was cloudy with light rain the day I walked by. But it was also warm, and so the windows were open. There was a constant buzz of activity from inside, so I guess the hands-on learning technique still applies.

The building on the left, on the Báthori utca corner of Bajcsy-Zsilinszky út, is where John von Neumann (Neumann János) was born and where he lived until he was eighteen. There are plaques on both sides of the display window. The plaque on the left side (in line with the man standing in front of the stop sign) was installed jointly by the American Mathematical Society and its Hungarian counterpart on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Neumann János, in 2003. The top half of the plaque is in Hungarian, repeated in English on the bottom half. The plaque on the right, Hungarian only, explains that it was originally installed in 1987 and then reinstalled in 2004 by the Hungarian Computer Science Society, recognizing his pioneering work in that field also.

Reforecasts

Ensemble reforecasts (Hamill et el., 2013) are available at the NOAA ESRL site. The site also provides real-time forecast data and real-time products, the latter having been calibrated based on the historical performance of the reforecasts. Among their list of products is an option to generate plots for a user-selected point displaying time series of the ensemble forecast spread of precipitation and temperature. The precipitation time series for my favorite point (32N, 111W; Tucson) have been consistent over the past week or so. Out of eleven members of the ensemble only one or two have been generating small amounts for tomorrow, roughly in agreement with the latest short-term model guidance of 10% POP (slightly higher chance of thunder) for tomorrow and Wednesday. The ensemble spread product is currently showing the next chance of small amounts of precipitation starting around 28 June.

Off and on I have been exploring how well the reforecasts handle fluctuations in precipitable water (PW) in and around Arizona, focusing on a month-long period centered around [the traditional Tucson understanding of] the start of the monsoon. I have been using the model initial conditions as verification. The data displayed in the figure below are from the initial conditions for the grid cell (T254 = 0.47 degrees lat/lon) closest to Tucson.

The figure contains three horizontal dashed lines for reference. Besides the line highlighting one inch of PW, the other two lines are labeled with approximate late-afternoon surface dewpoints (with a typically dry mid-level cap). There are 29 years of initialized data (and reforecasts, not shown), 1985 through 2013. Of those 29 years, 7 of the years on the indicated day were drier than the 25th percentile, 3 of the years were more moist than the 90th [corr. 1 Jul, original 16 Jun read 10th] percentile, etc. There are some interesting things to notice about the analyzed distribution during this month-long period. At the beginning of the period, on 20 June, only about 10 percent of the years have PW over one inch, while by the end of the period, on 20 July, about 75 percent of the years have PW over one inch. Also, it would be a mistake to look at only the upward trend in the mean, without noticing that the spread of the distribution reaches a maximum around the 4th of July. This large spread results in part from the fact that the dry percentiles (brown) level off for about one week, from 28 June until 5 July. The leveling off in turn is a composite from: (1) a few years that become moist in late June, and stay that way into July; (2) a few years that stay dry into early July; and (3) most years, 18 out of 29, which have a double peak--moistening in late June, then more or less drying out for an extended period in early July. A particularly high-amplitude version of this double peak was in the year 2004, when PW peaked at over one inch on 24 June (putting that year in the top ten percent for 24 June). Then the year 2004 dipped to less than 15 cm from 29 June through 7 July. Anyway, the point about the upcoming transitional period is that the ensemble reforecasts have a difficult challenge to meet in representing climatology, let alone for the forecast in a particular year to convey a sense of which days may depart from climatology.

Duplicitous shill?

Today that label was applied to Chris Matthews, in a The Huffington Post post by Joseph A. Palermo entitled Smearing Private Bergdahl: the Republican Right Descends to a New Low. Over the weekend I also read in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a column by Tony Norman entitled Bergdahl case unleashes all the hypocrites. Since I agree somewhat with both, but not entirely with either of those analyses, here is my impression. Bergdahl was a first-termer with a healthy sense of compassion for and interest in the people of Afghanistan, along with an unhealthy lack of fear (and perhaps disrespect for orders). The enemy took advantage of his curiosity to capture him. Eventually we will hear from Bergdahl himself. But at this point I don't know why anyone wants to read into it any more than that. Although I've often been disappointed with Obama's performance, I'm proud of the President's decision to make and his execution of the exchange. I am as proud of President Obama, as I am ashamed of Chris Matthews' (not to mention my barber's) smearing of a captured, now released, soldier.

Warm Winter

As the Northeast prepares for yet another Arctic airmass, here in Tucson the bougainvilleas are doing fine. Most years in late February this exposed corner would be a convolution of bare wood, badly needing pruning. Of the 22 (non-contiguous) years I've now lived in Tucson, this winter was among the top two or three warmest. It's no coincidence that the ranking would be approximately reversed for the same 22 winters in Pittsburgh.