Joe DeNardo

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this morning has a story that broadcast meteorologist Joe DeNardo died. Though the story acknowledges DeNardo's time with KDKA in the 1960's, the memories in that story are mostly from the time after I left the area.
Here are some memories from the 1960's. Joe was a star on both the radio and television sides of KDKA. In the mid-60's KDKA radio was trying to blend traditional public service news/sports with top-40 music. KDKA's morning radio show Pallan and Trow I was surprised to read started only in November 1965 and ran through April 1968. Pallan and Trow were talented comedian entertainers, not just ordinary hosts of a morning news/top-40 time slot. There was a certain time when I was getting ready for school when Joe would call in with the forecast discussion. Sometimes he couldn't stop laughing at the antics of the hosts, and he would have to call back later. I was a fan of Joe as much for being a straight man for Pallan and Trow as for being a serious meteorologist.
I was slow to give up completely on KDKA's blend. In the spring of 1967 I was taught to tune-in and turn-on to Chicago's upstart WCFL, which could be picked up after dark by tuning KDKA and then adjusting the dial slightly from 1020 to 1000. WCFL's weather forecasts were as brief as possible. It might be 89 in the northwest suburbs, 93 in the southwest suburbs, and 65 downtown at the lake. And of course as a good rule of thumb Chicago's weather today would be Pittsburgh's weather tomorrow.
So I credit WCFL as much as Joe DeNardo for my interest in weather. But Joe had the serious technical details, especially on the Sunday 11 pm newscast, when he would provide an outlook for the week ahead. At mid-week he would slide across the forecast 500-mb map, copied with grease pen onto a large clear plastic overlay. "Enhanced lake-effect snow showers on Wednesday/Thursday as this upper-air trough passes." The rest of the outlook into the following Sunday clearly communicated that his was a plausible scenario extrapolating into what was then for computer forecasts terra incognita.

Category Labels vs. Distinct Things

Suppose that it would be interesting, useful, or even important to categorize hot days for cities in the Northeast. A day when the temperature at the airport reached 95F or higher could be labeled Category 5 heat. Better yet, label that day a Scorcher. The Glossary of Meteorology would define Scorcher. Climate studies might draw conclusions about the number of Scorchers. To the question there would be a ready answer, What is responsible for this heat? Meteorologists say it is caused by something called a Scorcher. A simple report, Hot yesterday, a bit hotter today could be expanded into an earnest elucidation, Yesterday was not a Scorcher, but today we have a Scorcher because ...

Too often in meteorology an attribute of a thing is cast into a newly labeled category of that thing, and then in no time at all the name of that category is communicated as a distinct, peculiar thing, even though the new thing is basically the original thing, and the familiar label for the original thing adequately, succinctly and more clearly communicates the weather situation.

The jargon bomb is a subcategory of intense area of low pressure. Bomb does not categorize intensity, but rather the time rate of change of the central pressure of the low. If the question is, What is responsible for this wind?, then part of the answer is the large, ineradicable cold area of high pressure to the north of the low. Perhaps a sexy label could be devised for the high's stubborn persistence; anti-bomb? But no need for that. Already there is a long-established, familiar term that most everyone in the Northeast recognizes as labeling the overall pattern of extreme winter weather.

There are many other local labels that succinctly communicate a familiar pattern of wind, temperature, humidity and/or sky condition; examples include Santa Ana, Bora, Blue Norther and, in Arizona, Monsoon. These locally familiar labels are effective precisely because they resist being defined precisely. Instead they are learned as a pattern—know it when you see it. Conversely, when a subcategory of a thing is defined by numerical threshold(s) of attribute(s) of the original thing, it has to be wondered what is intended when using that jargon term for communication since use of the unfamiliar term requires a redundant reiteration of the threshold(s).

The term derecho is like the term bomb in that both terms could be termed second-generation categorizations. Derecho does not categorize the magnitude of the severe winds accompanying a fast-moving line of thunderstorms, but rather the time during which the line remains severe, or equivalently the area swept out by the line during that time. Certainly it is important for forecasters to recognize and for both forecasters and the public not to dismiss an unusually long-lived line of severe thunderstorms. But why not communicate the attributes unusually long-lived for the thing and unusually high confidence for the long-lead-time warning? (What's worse, earnest elucidations about the term derecho these days invariably short-circuit the history, butchering the fact that when the Spanish word for right translates to English straight it is not as a direction but as not evasive, honest.)

Polar air is a thing. It is defined by the climate system, not by an arbitrary numeric threshold. For the same reason, polar front, polar jet stream and polar vortex are all things. Arctic air is a distinct thing, generated by absent sun during the arctic winter. The labels Polar and Arctic are arbitrary jargon, but they are long-standing and deserve to be respected and elucidated. Arctic air—whether stationary, displaced or on the move—is both Weather and Climate, and, because it is generated by minimal sun where absolute humidity is very low, it will always be with us, no matter how much manmade greenhouse gases continue to increase and no matter what schemes may be instituted to reflect a portion of incoming solar energy.

[I acknowledge that at least part of this rant was inspired by the Air Weather Service Back to Basics program of 40 years ago.]

Republican Disgrace

In a few days I'll be back to posting about weather. But first, a follow-up to my previous post (about Collusion). Yesterday Senator Dianne Feinstein released a pdf-file of testimony, putting discussion about the famous dossier (prepared by Christopher Steele, the guy who's father had been a weather forecaster) back on the table. I'll quote from Josh Marshall's summary at Talking Points Memo:

... this is a testament to what can happen when the GOP unites behind a campaign of willful disinformation at the country's expense ...

I've read the first 140 of the 312 pages of the released pdf-file, and I would say that so far the contrast in questioning by the committee's majority vs. minority staff is striking, if not disgraceful.

Collusion

I'm about halfway through the book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, by Luke Harding. Along with events from the title, Harding presents a bio of Christopher Steele, the man who prepared the famous dossier. For me it's interesting to read that Steele's father had been a weather forecaster, and his grandfather a coal miner.
The book's sixth chapter is, among other things, about Paul Manafort's relationship with the Russian aluminum oligarch Oleg Deripaska. There is a quote from a Manafort email to an intermediary on July 7, 2016, in which the campaign manager offered to provide the aluminum oligarch with private briefings about the campaign. (The book expands on close ties to Putin.)
Whenever I have been hearing aluminum oligarch in connection with the ongoing investigations, I have been thinking about the Trump campaign appearance in Monessen, Pennsylvania, last year. Comedians at the time had fun with the bizarre scene of Trump standing amid bales of scrap aluminum prepared for recycling. A day after that event I commented in a post (mostly workplace memories from a long ago summer). Unsure if I remembered correctly the exact date, I later found an online news story, dateline MONESSEN (KDKA/AP). The Monessen speech was on Tuesday, June 28, 2016.
According to the news story, the appearance was a policy speech on free trade, where Trump outlined a seven-point plan to restore America's trade position. I don't recall or see in the news story any points of a plan, just the usual platitudes. In my earlier comment, I thought it odd to be celebrating bundling scrap for shipment to somewhere else. There were 200 invited guests according to the news story, with another 100 outside, half of them protesters (some of them from my hometown). The town of Monessen itself is not a Trump stronghold. In fact the mayor, who acknowledged inviting Trump to Monessen, was defeated for re-election this year.
There are so many odd things about that appearance in Monessen. It was as if the campaign manager's main objective was to have the candidate seen in a photo op with the bales of scrap aluminum. Perhaps that visual message was intended for a certain foreign country.

Candidates For 2nd Congressional District

Last Thursday evening Represent Me Arizona sponsored a forum for the five Democrats seeking to replace Martha McSally.

Seated left to right are Billy Kovacs, Mary S. Matiella, Matt Heinz, Ann Kirkpatrick and Bruce Wheeler. (Individual pictures/biographies/etc. are on the Represent Me Arizona website.)

I will be enthusiastically supporting whichever one of the five wins the primary. Each one brings special strengths to the fight. Hopefully the eventual winner will be able to channel the strengths of the other four, and the supporters of the other four will be able to quickly transfer their passions to the winner of the primary. Arizona's primary is late, the Tuesday before Labor Day, which makes Labor Day unity rallies critical. A clear front runner will probably emerge well before primary day (some might say that she already has). It will be essential for supporters of the other four not to feel like they have been railroaded. I believe that Represent Me Arizona will be adept in keeping everyone focused on the prize. For now, I really hope that all five primary candidates will have a good chance right up until the polls close on August 28.

If Martha McSally does decide to jump over to the senate primary race, going on a suicide mission to save the Republican party from its Kelli Ward nightmare, it will be because McSally decided that her CD2 re-election was already a lost cause.

Coding Can Be Fun Too

For almost 30 years, ever since Hypercard became available on the original Mac, I've relied on my own personal checkbook balancing program. Through the years, staying ahead of obsolesence, the little program eventually moved to an Xcode/Core Data/Objective-C version, and then recently it was upgraded to use Swift code.
Strictly speaking, the original was not my own program. Someone else had written a freely available Checking Hypercard Stack, and that stack ran inside the Hypercard shell. But you could tear apart a Hypercard stack to see how it worked, then put the pieces back together to suit your own desires and needs. It was fun to have complete control of the user interface.
My latest version is at github, in case anyone wants to tear it apart.

Monsoon Is Here; and Why It's Fun to Watch

Last evening around 6:30 I got several big drops with just a little thunder. A second round of storms mostly fizzled before 9 pm as it came across the mountains out of the northeast. Finally after 10 pm a light rain barely wetted the ground at my place. The 10:30 radar depicted that the second round had developed new convective life after it reached I-10; the brief stratiform rain at my place appeared to have built back from that slight rejuvenation. The same radar showed a few short lines persisting about 50 miles upstream. I went to bed. The third round came through about 1:30 am, preceded and followed by over an hour of loud thunder reverberating off the mountains and everything else. (Fortunately anguish about confident all over for tonight forecasts is well behind me, and it will be easy to fit in a nap today. The local media had mixed messages on their 10 pm newscasts, apparently depending on whether they had noticed the 9:55 pm NWS discussion.) It must have rained off and on for much of the rest of the night. I got 0.65 of an inch.
Ealier, between rounds one and two, at about 7:30 a radio alert announced that a severe warning had been issued for an area centered on the intersection of Alvernon-Drexel, 12 miles south-southeast of me. I went out to take a look, and spent several minutes jealously admiring a rain shaft intense enough to produce a bright rainbow even in the setting sun.

By the time I went inside to get my iphone, the rainbow had faded to what can be seen above. The Alvernon-Drexel intersection is to the right of the rainbow and about twice as far out. There was occasional-to-frequent lightning in that cloud to the right; none of my shots captured it.
A short time later overhead the setting sun was putting high contrast on mammatus under a mostly dissipated anvil.