Author Archives: gymnosperm

God and Dice

Posted on July 15, 2018

We don’t spend much time thinking about what God does for recreation these days, but the great scientists from Newton to Einstein who have framed our Western cosmology were often deeply religious men. It is understandable that when they found … Continue reading →

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Entropy and the Grand Canyon II

Posted on June 25, 2018

We left off in the last post having boated 78 miles, about five days on a typical trip, and having encountered the last of the suite of three books that comprise the geological story revealed in the Grand Canyon. We … Continue reading →

Posted in Geological Evolution of the Western United States, Paleogeography | Leave a comment

Entropy and the Grand Canyon

Posted on June 20, 2018

It has been our good fortune to row 280 miles of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon twice in the last seven months. This is rare for private boaters limited to one trip per calendar year and subject to … Continue reading →

Posted in Geology, Paleoclimate, Paleogeography | 1 Comment

CERES and MODTRAN VII, Clouds

Posted on June 9, 2018

MODTRAN deals only with infrared light, and at least the version we are using includes only low level cloud types.   Above is a screen shot of the menu. It can be seen that the highest altitude is three kilometers. … Continue reading →

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CERES and MODTRAN VI, Cloud Radiative Effect

Posted on April 10, 2018

CERES is the acronym for the rather chewy title Cloud Earth Radiative Effect Satellites. Displayed above is the TOA net flux in blue. The net TOA cloud radiative effect is in red. The axes are inverted to maintain the energy … Continue reading →

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CERES and MODTRAN V

Posted on April 3, 2018

We must begin by confessing that we have resorted to digitizing. The first CERES data were garnered by mousing over the visualization tool, writing in a notebook, and typing into Excel. We discovered that if we right clicked the tool … Continue reading →

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CERES and MODTRAN IV

Posted on March 25, 2018

The tile of this series promises a comparison of CERES and MODTRAN. The groundwork of exploring the CERES data in the first three posts is done. At the conclusion of the first post, we concluded that CERES and MODTRAN could … Continue reading →

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