Category Archives: Climate

We were puzzled about the Supergroup so we bought a pdf map from the Geological Society of America that covered the eastern part. We found that a forest of inconsequential faults, strikes and dips, and other notations was distracting us … Continue reading →

Geologists have great fun with puns on the term “schist”. Technically, it refers to metamorphic rock; rock that has been altered by high temperature and pressure. There are several grades of schist, our former favorite was “blue schist” as a … Continue reading →

River runners follow the water. The water is in our blood, and following it is what we do. We began this series by using the Colorado River as a transect, and following the drainages up to the South Rim as … Continue reading →

We left off the last post having accommodated MODTRAN radiance to the Planck curves, and having promised to derive the temperatures of the individual lines from an inversion of the Planck radiance formula to give the Planck brightness temperature. Unfortunately, … Continue reading →

The title of this post was supposed to be The Temperature and Altitude of Radiation to Space. With a bit of luck and perseverance that post will happen, but we’ve had so much trouble, the trouble itself seems to warrant a … Continue reading →

Bob Tisdale recently did a series of posts exploring the differences between using absolute temperature and temperature anomaly to understand the recent temperature evolution of our planet. Bob was interested in the extracted TMAX highs and TMIN lows, and showed … Continue reading →

Santa Rosa is comfortably away from the fires this year. Last year’s baptism cleaned out the tinder around here. Yet the Camp Fire has given us the peculiar combination of dense smoke and hard frost. A lot of the particles … Continue reading →

While it is clear that the earth is sort of round, rather like a baseball that has absorbed too many home runs, to the best of our understanding, the universe is flat. By flat, we do not mean that you … Continue reading →

An interesting upshot of Mr. Einstein’s famous equation is that in units of the speed of light, energy and mass are equal. Mr. Poincare once observed that mathematics is the exercise of making different things the same (equal), and sophistry … Continue reading →