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When the media reports on global warming, they like to talk about coastal flooding and severe weather... direct human impacts.

What particularly bums me, though, is the fact that probably every ecosystem on earth is going to be affected. There will be no pristine places left on the entire planet that are safe from the effects SUV exhaust and other excesses. Not northern Canada, not Sibera. Everywhere there will be tundra melting or species adjustment or rainfall changes in response to human activity. That makes me sorta sad.

We Americans are 5% of the world population, and we produce 25% of the world's CO2. So it is too bad that Bush has decided not to do anything.

• Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.
• The global warming trend.

On the positive side, solar flares are the primary cause of the aurora. Over next couple of years is the most likely time for them to occur. The link is NOAA's page where the data on auroras is updated every 5 minutes.

Plants have been doing this for millenia. Algae in the sea have been doing this for eons. Personally I dont think we need any "new" species doing what can be done already. If we focus on using what we already have wisely, we should have no reason to "create" new/better ones.

I think it is very haughty of us to presume that we know what is better for the world. Why don't we develop ways to better take advantage of those species already present? Estuaries and coral reefs are some of the most productive biological systems on the planet, and also two of the most fragile. The amount of carbon fixed by those sytems rivals the other sytems combined (including rainforests). But we as humans don't care much for them. We instead try to come up with systems suited to our needs when we should be figuring out how to protect the systems we already have.

Climate scientist have known about the urban heat island effect for a long time, and have *not* swept it under the rug. Statistical tools are used to take into account the UHI so as not to give a false impression of a more intense warming than is truly being experienced. Ask the good folks at NCDC about sweeping the UHI under the rug!

Leigh Orf

This is NOT Aqua support! This is XFree86 running on Darwin!

Er, no, it's running on CoreGraphics, aka "Quartz". Quartz is not part of Darwin.

So, you can have X on your screen, or you can have Aqua on your screen.

Or you can have both.

Either way, you're limited to programs compiled for what's on the screen.

No. The above link works for free now, XTools works for money now, and direct support in future Darwin XFree86's is planned.

I saved this from the last solar storm story on slashdot. (hey, alliteration!)

http://www.sec.noaa.gov/pmap/pmapN.html& lt;/a>
Shows the level of auroral activity in the northern hemisphere. Click around for a southern hemisphere view, ya' lazy bastards.

Traditionally it was held that magnetic fields have no effect on living organisms - but this is far from true. Given a constant force present in the environment it makes sense that a creature would evolve to account for it in some way. The earth has had a magnetic field since the dawn of life - it is not surprising that living creatures take advantage of it.

NOAA warns that class G1 and above magnetic storms may affect animal migrations.

Yup.

For all those aurora watchers out there, you may wish to look tonight. Both of my favorit sources are saying it's a go for likely observations tonight. I like to see a Pmap index of 8 or higher with the red zone covering some or all of Minnesota. A 7 should technically do it for my area, but I've never seen anything durring a 7. The Ace (MAG_SWEPAM) red line needs to be in the negatives, the more so the better. I also like to see the solar wind speed (yellow) high, but it isn't tonight. I'll be rechecking conditions about 9:30pm (Central/US) to see if a run out of town to observe is a good idea.

For all those aurora watchers out there, you may wish to look tonight. Both of my favorit sources are saying it's a go for likely observations tonight. I like to see a Pmap index of 8 or higher with the red zone covering some or all of Minnesota. A 7 should technically do it for my area, but I've never seen anything durring a 7. The Ace (MAG_SWEPAM) red line needs to be in the negatives, the more so the better. I also like to see the solar wind speed (yellow) high, but it isn't tonight. I'll be rechecking conditions about 9:30pm (Central/US) to see if a run out of town to observe is a good idea.

For all those aurora watchers out there, you may wish to look tonight. Both of my favorit sources are saying it's a go for likely observations tonight. I like to see a Pmap index of 8 or higher with the red zone covering some or all of Minnesota. A 7 should technically do it for my area, but I've never seen anything durring a 7. The Ace (MAG_SWEPAM) red line needs to be in the negatives, the more so the better. I also like to see the solar wind speed (yellow) high, but it isn't tonight. I'll be rechecking conditions about 9:30pm (Central/US) to see if a run out of town to observe is a good idea.

Here's the place to go for the space weather. The spot has sort of disappeared on the current imagery, but it's about dead center on the pics from the 24th Sep.

Anyway, there's a great site run by NOAA (http://www.sec.noaa.gov/SWN/) that has updated images of the Sun, sunspot activity, solar storms, and aurorae activity. Definitely worth checking out, especially if you live in an area that could possibly see aurorae.

It is warming.

Another example is nautical charts. All the data collection, etc. is done by NOAA, but Maptech, Inc. has been granted exclusive distribution rights. The result is that it is impossible to get nautical chart data without paying Maptech's outrageous fees. And this is data which taxpayers have ALREADY paid for!

Meteorological stations (the weather guages) in the 19th century were boxes stuck out on poles in the middle of a field. Meteorological stations in the 21st century are boxes stuck out on poles in the middle of an airport tarmac.

This is standard canard. The main component (70%) is measurements over the sea surface. Further, most warming has occurred since 1980-- long after the effect you cite should have appeared. Be careful; the petrochemical industry spends a lot of money spreading such "commonsense" nonsense.

Or what about the ozone hole? [...] And we have no theory today to explain why it subsequently shrunk.

Our lack of understanding is my point, but... this from the 1998 WMO/UNEP Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion: "The large ozone losses in the Southern Hemisphere polar region during spring continued unabated with approximately the same magnitude and areal extent as in the early 1990s. [...] These ozone changes are consistent overall with our understanding of chemistry and dynamics."

All I know for sure is that the Mount Pinatubo eruption last decade released more CO2 into the atmosphere in one week then the entire history of human industry.

Pure invention. Here are global CO2 levels as measured at the Muana Loa observatory. No discontinuity due to Pinatubo's 1992 eruption. (You're probably thinking of SO2, but you're still overstating.)

Human-caused CO2 increases are certain. Global warming is certain. The first should cause the second. But conceivably we're missing something, the CO2 increases are not causing global warming, and coincidentally some unknown, natural force is the real cause. It's possible. But odds of even, say, 1 in 10 that we're hosing the planet should perhaps give one pause.

Back to what I set out to say, there are many temperature series out there. Some of them go back over one hundred years. Reliable global temperature series don't seem possible in the pre-satelite era. Yes, many European cities have temperature series going back way further than that, and we have cores from the Greenland icecap which give us hints about the local-to-Greenland weather for hundreds of thousands of years. There is still some controversy about the conclusions to be drawn from them.

Here are a couple of links:
National Ice Coring Lab This has some ice core data sets, and some perspective on them.

Global Climate Perspectives System These guys have some models and some data up on the web.

Global Temperature Anomolies" This is a NASA site...

This is a fellow who seems to take it as given that the temperatures have increased (I'm still not convinced), but isn't sure about why.

Here is a site put up by some folks who aren't convinced by the popular press coverage of global warming.

I know I've found some much more usefull links in the past, but I can't stumble over them right now. One thing that you want to keep in mind is that ( according to researchers I've talked to) being trendy is vital to getting grant money. If the politicians and the bureaucrats they fund are convinced that global warming is politically significant, you base your grant proposals on the idea that global warming is real, even if the really interesting questions start from another premise. Or, you don't get funded. So while I won't say that anyone is whoring for grants, I will say that the scientific debate might be on rather different terms if it weren't for politics.

You were right, as is indicated by Climate Page at the NYC NWS Office Stand corrected, but it is interesting to note the they have had the 4th coolest July on record.

Bryan R.

You can view movies of the event taken by instruments on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite here. These are pretty neat to see as you can see the actual coronal mass ejection (CME) as it shoots out from the sun. This is the largest such event of this solar cycle. Another great space weather resource is the NOAA site here.

If you want more than charts and graphs, check out this realtime picture of Auroral Activity in the Northern Hemisphere.

It's usually cool to look at, but now it's fascinating!

Kevin Fox

Yeah, my little blue Abbott/Doenhoff is prominently placed amongst the "good books I don't read much anymore" bookshelf. It's a bit dated, since most modern aero types design their own airfoils for a particular application, but it is pretty good for developing an undergraduate level understanding of the applicable theory. The tas section is great. Unfortunately TOWS doesn't really go into more advanced methods. If you are interested I highly recommend Belotserkovski's "theory" book, and especially Richard Eppler's "Airfoil Design" book. Eppler's is interesting because he was a (very) early champion of computational techniques in airfoil design, and his book contains snippets of Fortran code that does just that. Also, UIUC has an excellent database of airfoils designed by Eppler and Selig which I have used quite extensively in building model aircraft.

Anyway aeronautics is the science of designing an airplane or other flying machine, not the science of determining the effect of deforestation on the living environment of people in Atlanta. That is meteorology, and the scientists imo should have sought funding from 1)their university (GA tech) 2)private sources (i.e. Ralph Nader, the green party, etc.) or 3) government agencies designed to support meteorological research, such as the National Climate Prediction Center", the National Weather Service or the NDBC. I don't think that NASA had any right to spend my money on this survey. If this case is a typical of their "Mission to Planet Earth", then I think that there is a problem with the organization that needs to be fixed- because NASA isn't designed to fill this role. If they had no better use for the money, then it should not have been spent- regardless of the fact that this is anathema to bureaucrats everywhere.

How I screwed up NASA's acronym is beyond me. I think you are right though- I have the NASM on my mind since I was in DC last week (4th). FYI I don't recommend that particular experience. No matter how patriotic you are, stay the hell away from that city in the summertime, especially on a national holiday.

Rev Neh

Yeah, my little blue Abbott/Doenhoff is prominently placed amongst the "good books I don't read much anymore" bookshelf. It's a bit dated, since most modern aero types design their own airfoils for a particular application, but it is pretty good for developing an undergraduate level understanding of the applicable theory. The tas section is great. Unfortunately TOWS doesn't really go into more advanced methods. If you are interested I highly recommend Belotserkovski's "theory" book, and especially Richard Eppler's "Airfoil Design" book. Eppler's is interesting because he was a (very) early champion of computational techniques in airfoil design, and his book contains snippets of Fortran code that does just that. Also, UIUC has an excellent database of airfoils designed by Eppler and Selig which I have used quite extensively in building model aircraft.

Anyway aeronautics is the science of designing an airplane or other flying machine, not the science of determining the effect of deforestation on the living environment of people in Atlanta. That is meteorology, and the scientists imo should have sought funding from 1)their university (GA tech) 2)private sources (i.e. Ralph Nader, the green party, etc.) or 3) government agencies designed to support meteorological research, such as the National Climate Prediction Center", the National Weather Service or the NDBC. I don't think that NASA had any right to spend my money on this survey. If this case is a typical of their "Mission to Planet Earth", then I think that there is a problem with the organization that needs to be fixed- because NASA isn't designed to fill this role. If they had no better use for the money, then it should not have been spent- regardless of the fact that this is anathema to bureaucrats everywhere.

How I screwed up NASA's acronym is beyond me. I think you are right though- I have the NASM on my mind since I was in DC last week (4th). FYI I don't recommend that particular experience. No matter how patriotic you are, stay the hell away from that city in the summertime, especially on a national holiday.

Rev Neh

Yeah, my little blue Abbott/Doenhoff is prominently placed amongst the "good books I don't read much anymore" bookshelf. It's a bit dated, since most modern aero types design their own airfoils for a particular application, but it is pretty good for developing an undergraduate level understanding of the applicable theory. The tas section is great. Unfortunately TOWS doesn't really go into more advanced methods. If you are interested I highly recommend Belotserkovski's "theory" book, and especially Richard Eppler's "Airfoil Design" book. Eppler's is interesting because he was a (very) early champion of computational techniques in airfoil design, and his book contains snippets of Fortran code that does just that. Also, UIUC has an excellent database of airfoils designed by Eppler and Selig which I have used quite extensively in building model aircraft.

Anyway aeronautics is the science of designing an airplane or other flying machine, not the science of determining the effect of deforestation on the living environment of people in Atlanta. That is meteorology, and the scientists imo should have sought funding from 1)their university (GA tech) 2)private sources (i.e. Ralph Nader, the green party, etc.) or 3) government agencies designed to support meteorological research, such as the National Climate Prediction Center", the National Weather Service or the NDBC. I don't think that NASA had any right to spend my money on this survey. If this case is a typical of their "Mission to Planet Earth", then I think that there is a problem with the organization that needs to be fixed- because NASA isn't designed to fill this role. If they had no better use for the money, then it should not have been spent- regardless of the fact that this is anathema to bureaucrats everywhere.

How I screwed up NASA's acronym is beyond me. I think you are right though- I have the NASM on my mind since I was in DC last week (4th). FYI I don't recommend that particular experience. No matter how patriotic you are, stay the hell away from that city in the summertime, especially on a national holiday.

Rev Neh

Although inital conditions are important for the initiation of tornadic thunderstorms. Most of the energy for these storms comes from an upper atmosphereic condition that is set up due to TERRAIN, not soil color or extra lakes or roads, Warm moist air moves out of the gulf of mexico Northward while warm dry air flows NE from the Mexican Plateu. This creates a atmospheric setup with southerly wet air under westerly warm dry air. This is inherently unstable. When the air on the ground is warmed by the sun it rises to the level of the inversion. When it is warmed significanlty it can "punch" through the inversion and release enery by condenstation all the way to 200mb producing a thunderstorm. This thunder storm does not in itself produce a tornado, but rather the turning of the winds from SE/SSE to W/NW creates a slowly spinning mass. Then rapidly rising air can accelerate this mass into a tornadic thunderstorm, through conservation of angular momentum and other forces (specifically the rotation of horizontal vorticity into the vertical). For more explaination see http:// www.nssl.noaa.gov As you can see. Inital conditons at the ground are only a minor consideration in the process. Important yes the whole story not even close. Most of the process is an accumulation of many other things that occur very far away.

By the way, the weather service did get themselves their own parallel computing cluster (running Linux, by the way). Incidentially, the progress made in simulating nuclear blasts carries directly over to astronomers who simulate supernovae.

I went through most of high school with a slide rule; it was a *very* big deal when I bought my first calculator, for hundreds of dollars, from Sears...

And yet, before that, a whole lot of computational stuff we now take for granted was all done mechanically.

Check out TIDE-PREDICTING MACHINE No. 2

"This machine was designed by Rollin A. Harris and E.G. Fischer and constructed in the instrument shop of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey.

It was completed in 1910 and replaced the Ferrel Tide-Predicting Machine in 1912."

"The machine summed 37 constituents and was capable of tracing a curve graphically depicting the results."

Whoa! So you don't have to write down the output! Now that's a feature! But don't laugh! It was necessary to write down the output on previous models.

"It is about 11 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 6 feet high, and weighs approximately 2,500 pounds."

And this was state-of-the-art, at the time!

t_t_b
--

For a current look at the density around earth, check out NASA's Spaceweather site. You can find graphs of the solar wind's speed, density, composition, and polairity at the ACE Solar Wind Observatory site. Look under ACE Plots.

The ACE Real Time Solar Wind plots jumped from around 500km/s to 800km/s just before 9AM UTC (+0000). I can't wait to see what it will look like tonight.

thanks, kristau

Whatever your answer, I think it's fair to say that there is something about this system, which uses an open-source clustering technology, built on top of an open-source operating system, which made it best for your needs; maybe it was the reliabilty, or the ability to modify it as needed, or maybe just the lower dollar cost to your department.

My question then, is this: have you given any thought to how you can help advance open source software, to give back to the community that created this tool? Getting the word out that the U.S. Goverment uses Linux for its cutting-edge weather forecasting tool would be an enormous PR win for the folks that still have trouble convincing their management that OSS software can be trusted for "real work." I'm not suggesting putting a picture of 'Tux' on every weather forecast, (although that would be kinda cute,) but it would be great if NOAA press releases about the project gave at least passing mention to the fact that the project will be benefitting from open source software.

I realize this is not something you would normally do for, say a Cray or IBM, but those are commercial enterprises, with their own PR budgets; they don't need your help to get their word out. OSS needs all the help it can get, so that future projects like yours can continue to reap the benefits.

I hate to tell you this guys, but for those of you who think Open Source != Communism, you are sadly mistaken. You can continue to delude yourself but it doesn't make it any less true. People who want to "open source" hardware, ALL proprietary software, and now radio and probably TV and music? Why not just come out and say it? All property should be community property and everyone takes whatever they need from others.

Okay, everyone all together now: "All property should be community property and everyone takes whatever they need from others."

There, feel better?

No, you're right, there's no such thing as the "excluded middle" in logic, so you must be right that anyone who doesn't argue for the most extreme forms of intellectual property (what I like to call "intellectual privilege", for a variety of reasons, e.g. the gov't takes it away after a fairly limited amount of time and places into the public domain -- kinda like how it treated Elian Gonzalez, heh ;-) must therefore be arguing for the most extreme forms of communism.

You want MS Office 2000? No prob, just download it. MS wants a copy of your latest program? No problem, they download it. Clinton wants the latest copy of Playboy? No problem, he breaks into a magazine shop and takes it. Want free Internet access? No problem, just crack passwords and dial up.

Let me get this straight. You're saying these things aren't happening now?? "According to Janet Reno and Clinton lawyer Bob Bennett, the magazine shop had been given more than enough time to liberate the latest issue of Playboy, so the use of force to obtain 10 copies of that issue for `important White House activities relating to a dire shortage of interns' was way past due, justifying the raid of the store by 50 BATFP agents." -- ABC News, 2000-07-09.

Communism doesn't do anything for people but use them as slaves for the sake of fattening the government and the people in power..

Gee, almost like how America's supposedly "compassionate" combination retirement-home, health-care-facility, and mental-ward otherwise referred to as "The Federal Government", post-FDR anyway? (Okay, you don't quite have to be among the elite ruling class in the USA to enjoy a top-flight lifestyle while you're forced to pay for the stupid, avoidable mistakes made by people you've never met by a government that has never really cared...but it sure helps to be friendly with that elite, if you don't want your stock valuations sued out from under you.)

i.e. look at the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro in Cuba. NOTHING good has ever come out of communism. NOTHING.

Oh, come on. What about hockey? Ballet? "Hot Cuban Chicks", as the wags put it? You think Russians and Cubans would naturally have come up with these things without the direct intervention of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Castro, and the helpful influence of Mao, Pol Pot, etc.? Keep in mind most of the very best hockey players and ballet dancers would have been couch potatoes like me ("I coulda been a contendah!", says I) if it weren't for the prospect of becoming a mere statistic in the latest Communist-sponsored "mass re-education"....

Remember that open source kiddies.

Remember that open source kiddies what? Did you run out of money before you could buy a verb or something?

This whole stupid movement will collapse like the ponzi scheme it is when people realize that they may want to get PAID to do the WORK that they HAVE done in case they some day want to retire without living in a complete [****]hole on a meager social security or welfare income.

Ah, but by the time we retire, our leaders will have Taken Over, the Great RMS will rule the world, and he will give each of us of the crumbs of his great wealth and power! Can't wait to run NASA, the National Weather Service, and The Weather Channel, myself...or did you think I wrote GNU Fortran because I actually write in that hackforsaken language?? Hahahahahaha!!

GPS is such a vital tool in land surveying that I fear having to relocate those pins scattered all though the US, and can you imagine the inaccuracies that this would cause? How far would it set us back? Think of the
NOAA experiment that found the Washington Monument to be a different height then previously measured. (new height is
here)

• Temperature: 77 F (25 C)
• Dew Point: 73 F (23 C)
• Relative Humidity: 88%

A good plot on the SESC page to watch is the GOES magnetometer .

When this starts gyrating, it's time to look.

About the only thing you'll see is aurora and about the most specific you can get is "in the sky." You will most likely see it North of your position, but, depending on the intensity of the storm, you may see it overhead and south.

When is also a tricky call. Once the ejected matter reaches the earth's magnetic field, it will distort its shape and lead to the interesting stuff. Apart from the basic t=x/v type calculation, you can't get much more specific.

Keep an eye on the GOES magnetometer . When it starts gyrating, it's time to start watching.

By the way, you can't miss it when you see it (I've seen it once - a result of a mass ejected by a flare). It helps to get away from city lights.

I see some of the space weather sites going down hard tonight. The biggest effect of this storm will be that a LOT of university sites will have to upgrade their systems.

Click here for the Space Environment Center's daily forecast and current conditions. Nice plots, basically of the Sun and Earth conditions. No solar wind, though.

Also the SOHO spacecraft has a really awesome monitor, results from which are shown at this page .
Be the first on your block to detect the CME shock front! :)

kabloie

Space Environment Center says: "Solar protons with energies greater than 30 MeV are particularly hazardous. In October 1989, the Sun produced enough energetic particles that an astronaut on the Moon, wearing only a space suit and caught out in the brunt of the storm, would probably have died. (Astronauts who had time to gain safety in a shelter beneath moon soil would have absorbed only slight amounts of radiation.)"

MM5: http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/mm5/mm 5-home.html
This is the primary research model used in the met. community and is generally used for short range prediction (out to ~48 hours). Fairly easy to work with though getting all of your data set up can be a bit of a hassle.

ARPS: http://www.caps.ou.edu:80/ARPS/
The ARPS model is being worked on by the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS) at the Univ. of Oklahoma. The goal of CAPS is to provide short term predictions of hazardous weather. Everything but the kitchen sink in the code. Not the fastest code out there for sure.

WRF: http://wrf.fsl.noaa.gov/
The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is the next generation community model that is currently being developed. This model will be used both for research as well as operational forecasting. This is the successor to MM5. The NWS will begin to run this model operationally at some point once development gets far enough along.

-mike

MM5: http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/mm5/mm 5-home.html
This is the primary research model used in the met. community and is generally used for short range prediction (out to ~48 hours). Fairly easy to work with though getting all of your data set up can be a bit of a hassle.

ARPS: http://www.caps.ou.edu:80/ARPS/
The ARPS model is being worked on by the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS) at the Univ. of Oklahoma. The goal of CAPS is to provide short term predictions of hazardous weather. Everything but the kitchen sink in the code. Not the fastest code out there for sure.

WRF: http://wrf.fsl.noaa.gov/
The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is the next generation community model that is currently being developed. This model will be used both for research as well as operational forecasting. This is the successor to MM5. The NWS will begin to run this model operationally at some point once development gets far enough along.

-mike

In a previous life I was a meteorology graduate from Rutgers University (1988). While its nice that they have a bigger and better computer, unless and until thay have better input/initialization data to feed it, I can't see how the forecasts will get any better.

Twice a day (0Z and 12 Z) the main prediction models are initialized with data from all over the world. Not only surface data, but "upper air" data as well. Upper air data come from sparsely located stations that actually have the ability to send up and record data from weather balloons.

To give you an idea of how sparse these stations are, near my house in New Jersey (USA), the closest upper air observation sites are from nearby:
Albany NY
Pittsburgh, PA
Wallops Island Virgina.

Every gridpoint in between, no matter how many there are, is interpolated/guessed at as initialization for the various numerical models that depend on that data.

Click here for a complete list of NWS stations that are included in the national upper air data collection network .

So while they might have the ability to have more gridpoints, and they can have the capability of modeling the interactions between more gridpoints, the initialization data is still the same. It seems to me that they also need to spend more money on getting more data.

I remember the Olympics in Atlanta. IBM setup a very sophisticated weather observing system that allowed the NWS to predict weather at each individual venue. They were able to do this because they had upper air data every 10 or so miles a *few* (i.e. more than twice) times each day.

Click here if you would like to see the current output of these models. This will lead to a whole set of links for the various models. Some sites are better than others (the Unisys site and the Uinversity of Wisconsin site are the best.

The current models of choice at the NWS are the ETA and AVN. The NGM is an older model they still run and is referenced in many of their discussions. They run it as an internal consistency check to make sure the other models did't get caught in a chaos loop somewhere.

George Bernard Shaw wrote to The Times of London about an overzealous editor with a wooden ear: ``There is a pedant on your staff who spends far too much of his time searching for split infinitives. Every good literary craftsman uses a split infinitive if he thinks the sense demands it. I call for this man's instant dismissal; it matters not whether he decides to quickly go or to go quickly or quickly to go. Go he must, and at once.''

Let me state up front, categorically, that there exists no rule banning split infinitives in English. If you believe me, skip the rest. If you don't believe me, then perhaps you should check with Oxford. :-)

What you're seeing here is widely consider to be unreasonably fallout from the nutty English grammarians of the 18th century who tried to reanalyse English using Latin grammar. Why? They thought that Latin was the most nearly perfect language they do. Innumerable bogus rules have been injected into the heads of the weak-mined. Such rules include the rule to never split infinitives, as well as the one that prepositions are not words to end sentences with. These bogosities have no place in English.

Look at this sentence: ``He learned to quickly read.'' If you make it ``He learned quickly to read,'' you've altered the meaning, and if you make it ``He learned to read quickly,'' you've introduced an infelicitous ambuiguity. Did he learn quickly, or read quickly?

Consider, please, the following:

"Why can't you really understand me?", asked Jane.

"Because", replied Dick, "I don't want to really understand you."

• Really, I don't want to understand you.
• I really don't want to understand you.
• I don't really want to understand you.
• I don't want really to understand you.
• *I don't want to understand really you.
• I don't want to understand you, really.
• I don't want to understand you.

• I helped her to break the ice.

• I helped her break the ice.
• I saw her break the ice.
• I made her break the ice.
• I let her break the ice.

"Of course, forcing modern speakers of English to not--whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas. Julius Caesar could not have have split an infinitive if he had wanted to. In Latin the infinitive is a single word like facere or dicere, a syntatic atom. English is a different kind of language. It is an "isolating" language, building sentences around many simple words instead of a few complicated ones. The infinitive is composed of two words--a complementizer, to, and a verb, like go. Words, by definition, are rearrangeable units, and there is no conceivable reason why an adverb should not come between them:

Space--the final frontier.... These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; and (5) those who know and distinguish.

1. Those who neither know nor care are the vast majority, and are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes. 'To really understand' comes readier to their lips and pens than 'really to understand'; they see no reason why they should not say it (small blame to them, seeing that reasons are not their critics' strong point), and they do say it, to the discomfort of some among us, but not to their own.

2. To the second class, those who do not know but do care, who would as soon be caught putting their knives in their mouths as splitting an infinitive but have only hazy notions of what constitutes that deplorable breach of etiquette, this article is chiefly addressed. These people betray by their practice that their aversion to the split infinitive springs not from instinctive good taste, but from tame acceptance of the misinterpreted opinion of others; for they will subject their sentences to the queerest distortions, all to escape imaginary split infinitives. 'To really understand' is a s.i.; 'to really be understood' is a s.i.; 'to be really understood' is not one; the havoc that is played with much well-intentioned writing by failure to grasp that distinction is incredible. Those upon whom the fear of infinitive-splitting sits heavy should remember that to give conclusive evidence, by distortions, of misconceiving the nature of the s.i. is far more damaging to their literary pretensions than an actual lapse could be; for it exhibits them as deaf to the normal rhythm of English sentences. No sensitive ear can fail to be shocked if the following examples are read aloud, by the strangeness of the indicated adverbs. Why on earth, the reader wonders, is that word out of its place? He will find, on looking through again, that each has been turned out of a similar position, viz between the word be and a passive participle. Reflection will assure him that the cause of dislocation is always the same -- all these writers have sacrificed the run of their sentences to the delusion that 'to be really understood' is a split infinitive. It is not; and the straitest non-splitter of us all can with a clear conscience restore each of the adverbs to its rightful place: He was proposed at the last moment as a candidate likely generally to be accepted. / When the record of this campaign comes dispassionately to be written, and in just perspective, it will be found that ... / New principles will have boldly to be adopted if the Scottish case is to be met. / This is a very serious matter, which dearly ought further to be inquired into. / The Headmaster of a public school possesses very great powers, which ought most carefully and considerately to be exercised. / The time to get this revaluation put through is when the amount paid by the State to the localities is very largely to be increased.

3. The above writers are bogy-haunted creatures who for fear of splitting an infinitive abstain from doing something quite different, i.e. dividing be from its complement by an adverb; see further under POSITION OF ADVERBS. Those who presumably do know what split infinitives are, and condemn them, are not so easily identified, since they include all who neither commit the sin nor flounder about in saving themselves from it -- all who combine a reasonable dexterity with acceptance of conventional rules But when the dexterity is lacking disaster follows. It does not add to a writer's readableness if readers are pulled up now and again to wonder -- Why this distortion? Ah, to be sure, a non-split die-hard! That is the mental dialogue occasioned by each of the adverbs in the examples below. It is of no avail merely to fling oneself desperately out of temptation; one must so do it that no traces of the struggle remain. Sentences must if necessary be thoroughly remodelled instead of having a word lifted from its original place and dumped elsewhere: What alternative can be found which the Pope has not condemned, and which will make it possible to organise legally public worship ? / It will, when better understood, tend firmly to establish relations between Capital and Labour. / Both Germany and England have done ill in not combining to forbid flatly hostilities. / Every effort must be made to increase adequately professional knowledge and attainments. / We have had to shorten somewhat Lord D--'s letter. / The kind of sincerity which enables an author to move powerfully the heart would ... / Safeguards should be provided to prevent effectually cosmopolitan financiers from manipulating these reserves.

4. Just as those who know and condemn the s.i. include many who are not recognisable, since only the clumsier performers give positive proof of resistance to temptation, so too those who know and approve are not distinguishable with certainty. When a man splits an infinitive, he may be doing it unconsciously as a member of our class 1, or he may be deliberately rejecting the trammels of convention and announcing that he means to do as he will with his own infinitives. But, as the following examples are from newspapers of high repute, and high newspaper tradition is strong against splitting, it is perhaps fair to assume that each specimen is a manifesto of independence: It will be found possible to considerably improve the present wages of the miners without jeopardizing the interests of capital. / Always providing that the Imperialists do not feel strong enough to decisively assert their power in the revolted provinces. / But even so, he seems to still be allowed to speak at Unionist demonstrations. / It is the intention of the Minister of Transport to substantially increase all present rates by means of a general percentage. / The men in many of the largest districts are declared to strongly favour a strike if the minimum wage is not conceded.

   It should be noticed that in these the separating adverb could have been placed outside the infinitive with little or in most cases no damage to the sentence-rhythm (considerably after miners, decisively after power, still with clear gain after be, substantially after rates, and strongly at some loss after strike), so that protest seems a safe diagnosis.

5. The attitude of those who know and distinguish is something like this: We admit that separation of to from its infinitive is not in itself desirable, and we shall not gratuitously say either 'to mortally wound' or 'to mortally be wounded', but we are not foolish enough to confuse the latter with 'to be mortally wounded', which is blameless English nor 'to just have heard' with 'to have just heard', which is also blameless. We maintain, however, that a real s.i., though not desirable in itself, is preferable to either of two things, to real ambiguity, and to patent artificiality. For the first, we will rather write 'Our object is to further cement trade relations' than, by correcting into 'Our object is further to cement ...', leave it doubtful whether an additional object or additional cementing is the point. And for the second, we take it that such reminders of a tyrannous convention as 'in not combining to forbid flatly hostilities' are far more abnormal than the abnormality they evade. We will split infinitives sooner than be ambiguous or artificial; more than that, we will freely admit that sufficient recasting will get rid of any s.i. without involving either of those faults, and yet reserve to ourselves the right of deciding in each case whether recasting is worth while. Let us take an example: 'In these circumstances, the Commission, judging from the evidence taken in London, has been feeling its way to modifications intended to better equip successful candidates for careers in India and at the same time to meet reasonable Indian demands.' To better equip ? We refuse 'better to equip' as a shouted reminder of the tyranny; we refuse 'to equip better' as ambiguous (bett er an adjective?); we regard 'to equip successful candidates better' as lacking compactness, as possibly tolerable from an anti-splitter, but not good enough for us. What then of recasting? 'intended to make successful candidates fitter for' is the best we can do if the exact sense is to be kept, it takes some thought to arrive at the correction; was the game worth the candle?

After this inconclusive discussion, in which, however, the author's opinion has perhaps been allowed to appear with indecent plainness, readers may like to settle the following question for themselves. 'The greatest difficulty about assessing the economic achievements of the Soviet Union is that its spokesmen try absurdly to exaggerate them; in consequence the visitor may tend badly to underrate them.' Has dread of the s.i. led the writer to attach his adverbs to the wrong verbs, and would he not have done better to boldly split both infinitives, since he cannot put the adverbs after them without spoiling his rhythm? Or are we to give him the benefit of the doubt, and suppose that he really meant absurdly to qualify try and badly to qualify tend?

It is perhaps hardly fair that this article should have quoted no split infinitives except such as, being reasonably supposed (as in 4) to be deliberate, are likely to be favourable specimens. Let it therefore conclude with one borrowed from a reviewer, to whose description of it no exception need be taken: 'A book ... of which the purpose is thus -- with a deafening split infinitive -- stated by its author: "Its main idea is to historically, even while events are maturing, and divinely -- from the Divine point of view -- impeach the European system of Church and States".'

This all shows that you should boldy split infinitives as the sense demands. Or, if you prefer ``ought to'' over ``should'', that you ought to boldly split infinitives. :-)

My employer would never have won the $15 million FSL bid
(see this press release) without a good Fortran 95 compiler.

Most people who don't use fortran don't think that anyone uses Fortran. They are mistaken.

before you go paying for that info check with noaa, they have free weather stats on an ftp server updated hourly by the nws. It's METAR code in an ascii flat file... I'm sure you can write a dtd to parse it. Most of the data you're looking for is probably available from the government for free. There are also places to get watches and warnings, special info, sunrise/sunset, etc... that's your tax dollars at work. (note: they have to collect this info anyway for the FAA and other groups in the government, now they also give it away for free on the net.) Actually in some places I swear this is where the weather channel gets their data from.

before you go paying for that info check with noaa, they have free weather stats on an ftp server updated hourly by the nws. It's METAR code in an ascii flat file... I'm sure you can write a dtd to parse it. Most of the data you're looking for is probably available from the government for free. There are also places to get watches and warnings, special info, sunrise/sunset, etc... that's your tax dollars at work. (note: they have to collect this info anyway for the FAA and other groups in the government, now they also give it away for free on the net.) Actually in some places I swear this is where the weather channel gets their data from.

Yes, gop."gov" is more of an organization, not a government body, such as noaa.gov, nasa.gov, or nist.gov.

There should be a line drawn between special interests bodies and official government services.

http://science.msfc.n asa.gov/newhome/essd/essd_strat_temp.htm - globally averaged atmospheric temperatures - troposphere and stratosphere.

http://sc ience.msfc.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/notebook/ess d13aug98_1.htm - Unexpected results from satelite measurements.

http://www.cgcp.rsc.ca/en glish/html_documents/whatis.html - climate change in general, including long term and "global warming". General background.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/onlineprod/p rod.html - the blank areas on the map on the left are where there are no measurements. Most of the ocean... Globally averaged atmospheric temperatures in the map on the right. General upward trend, but a LOT of fluctuation.

http://science.msfc.n asa.gov/newhome/essd/essd_strat_temp.htm - globally averaged atmospheric temperatures - troposphere and stratosphere.

http://sc ience.msfc.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/notebook/ess d13aug98_1.htm - Unexpected results from satelite measurements.

http://www.cgcp.rsc.ca/en glish/html_documents/whatis.html - climate change in general, including long term and "global warming". General background.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/onlineprod/p rod.html - the blank areas on the map on the left are where there are no measurements. Most of the ocean... Globally averaged atmospheric temperatures in the map on the right. General upward trend, but a LOT of fluctuation.

While I don't agree with you, I understand how you feel. Global warming is scary stuff, and denial is a natural reaction to unpleasant news. You might want to check out some actual data at The National Climatic Data Center or the National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

While I don't agree with you, I understand how you feel. Global warming is scary stuff, and denial is a natural reaction to unpleasant news. You might want to check out some actual data at The National Climatic Data Center or the National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

http://www-unix.mcs.anl.go v/~michalak/ecmwf98/final.html, Design of a Next-Generation Regional Weather Research and Forecast Model

http://nic.fb4.noaa.gov:800 0/research/wrf.98july17.html, Dynamical framework of a semi-Lagrangian contender for the WRF model

A few other thoughts:

1. Not only are the Alpha 264s unmatched in terms of both floating point performance and memory bandwidth (although the next-generation PPC is very good in that regard also), they are also among the best at dealing with the data-dependencies and access-latencies which occur in real scientific codes.
2. DEC^H^H^HCompaq probably has the best compiler technology of anybody out there commercially (IBM are also very good technically, but as Toon Moene of the Netherlands Met Office put it, "XLF was the first compiler I ever encountered that made you write a short novel on the command line in order to get decent performance."
3. Note for AC # 68 State-of-the-art weather models are not spectral models. Spectral models are appropriate only for very coarse scales at which cloud effects are only crudely parameterized (and to some extent are only appropriate on vector-style machines (and not current microprocessor/parallel) because of the way they generate humongous vector-lengths). At the WRF scales, the flow is not weakly compressible! Note that the global data motion implied by the FFTs in hybrid spectral/explicit models is a way to absolutely kill scalability for massively parallel systems. Finally, spectral models do not support air quality forecasting, such as we are doing (see http://envpro.ncsc.org/projects/NAQP/).
4. Weather modeling is a problem which has exponentially-growing divergence of solutions (two "nearby" initial conditions lead to different solutions that diverge exponentially in time), so as coyote-san suggests, there is a tendency to run multiple "ensemble" forecasts, each of which is itself a computationally-intense problem. So far, I haven't managed to get the funding to develop a stochastic alternative (which will be a fairly massive undertaking -- any volunteers?) This means weather modeling can soak up all avaailable CPU power for the (foreseeable)^2 future. At least the individual runs in ensemble forecasts are embarassingly-parallel.

Hi, Greg! Didn't know you were here!

If you want to put your big monitors to use, NOAA posts a handfull of
big high resolution satellite images here.