I can indeed say "corporate welfare". And I detest it, except in rare situations where it's the lesser of two evils and the alternative would negatively impact the public, as in the late 1980's with Unisys...they were about to go bankrupt and were bailed out by the government so the NEXRAD network could be completed without having to out for bid again, a decade-long process the first time around. Well, even then I detest it, but in situations like that there's not a lot you can do about it. Today, Unisys provides some of the most hideous "services" available, and have continually worked to keep all sorts of data to themselves (such as NEXRAD data, which eventually failed, fortunately). I think it's only a matter of time before they go under, this time for good.
It's available real-time for a fee due to the bandwidth necessary to download it, only archived data is currently available for free. Unless you're aware of some public location where you can download live Level II, in which case please let me know!:-)
No doubt a great deal of his concern is also over having to re-write a bunch of their application code to accomodate the new formats, in addition to lowering the level of obscure knowledge future competition needs to succeed.
Basically, there is no benefit to updating the formats for old companies like Accu-Weather, thus it's not surprising they would oppose the change. Newer/future businesses, by contrast, will welcome it, as it eases the data-acquisition and interpretation process...not to mention the fact that it makes it easier for TV stations, individuals, etc., to create their own products. My view is that if the reasonably-knowledgeable individual can perform this task, then perhaps the degreed meteorologists (particularly ones with graduate degrees) should be doing something which makes better use of their advanced skills. We may be in the beginning phases of a structural shift within the field of private meteorology, one shifting away from simply providing data and towards providing advanced data analysis. One way or another, seeking industry protection from the government instead of getting off the collective corporate butt and innovating, is the surest route towards declining revenues and unprofitability I can think of. The history books are littered with businesses that stagnated using the protectionist approach, and the history books will be littered with many more (Accu-Weather likely being a prime target if they refuse to put forth the effort to innovate).
Luckily, this data structure change has been in the works for years, and there is probably little Accu-Weather can do about it, as it would negatively impact the NWS since they've already written their next-generation visualization tools using XML, etc. Their current toolset is really starting to show its age, they can't be stuck with it forever. Also, with the NOAAPORT upgrade currently being implemented, anyone with a DirectTV-style satellite dish and a PC will be able to host their own real-time meteorological database. They're even planning on feeding live Level II NEXRAD data across it, which is pretty amazing given the amount of data that represents (about 100GB/day)! So even given a worst-case scenario where most internet access to NWS products is disabled, it really won't take much to access more data than even most businesses, let alone any one individual, could possibly know what to do with.
What I'd like to see from the open-source community are more tools to access the weather data we currently have. Any information you want (short of Level II NEXRAD data, due to bandwidth issues) is available real-time, today. There are almost no applications to deal with it, though. I've often thought of writing tools to do so, but other commitments, combined with little experience writing GUI applications (let alone visualization software), have kept me from following through.
Actually, I live in one of the most climatologically favored locations for damaging hail--central Oklahoma. I never meant to insinuate that large hail is not something to be concerned about, but rather to point out that its relative rarety can easily explain why there would be anecdotal "evidence" that claims these devices actually work.
As other posters have pointed out, these systems have been used to protect high value crops since the eighties...
That doesn't mean the system actually works, since damaging hail is very rare, even in the most hail-prone locations. Earlier incarnations of "hail cannons" have been around since the 1800s, when they shot random garbage skyward into thunderstorms...so ironically, whether or not the storm actually did anything, they were guaranteed a hail of trash (often nuts/bolts, things of that nature which were actually quite dangerous).
...and furthermore, Nissan are probably concerned with ALL sizes of hail...
Unless Nissan uses Rust-O-Leum to paint their cars, in my experience you need severe hail (defined by the National Weather Service as 0.75" in diameter) at the very *least* to do anything to the paint job of an automobile. I've never seen hail less than about 1 1/2" leave any visible mark on a car, and I've seen plenty of hail. If I had just brought a brand-new Mercedes, I would have no problems with driving it through a hailstorm with a maximum hail size of 1". It sounds really bad when it's hitting your car, but doesn't do anything.
To clarify, I wasn't "quoting energy amounts", but rather pointing out that in the equations of motion, the term representing sound waves is insignificant (by many orders of magnitude) when compared to terms representing quantities such as advection (wind), vorticity (turbulence), etc. In other words, any "effect" from this device would be nothing more than white noise in the grand scheme of things (no pun intended). Not to mention the fact that thunder--which occurs even more frequently than 5-6 sec in many storms, can be heard from farther away, and is associated with electromagnetic fields & ion counts the makers of this device can only dream of--sure seems to stop all that hail.
The electromagnetic forces inside a thunderstorm are mind-bogglingly intense because of the fact that air is such a great insulator, so shooting ions more than a few meters into the air, let alone into the bowels of a storm, is not something that sounds at all feasible to me. I suppose it might be possible to induce a lightning strike as the ions build up near the unit (whether actively through intervention or passively through natural forces is probably a matter of debate), but then as soon as it gets hit its "usefulness" will quickly come to an end anyway.
As an aside, lightning is generally believed to occur due to charge separation inside the storm due to cloud microphysics, with positive charge accumulating near the ground, possibly partly due to friction from rain. What actually triggers the lightning strike is unknown, though one theory that has recently been gaining some traction proposes that cosmic rays cause a sudden breakdown in the electrical resistance of air which rapidly snowballs (over the course of a fraction of a second), allowing lightning to occur. Obviously things are a bit more complicated than that, but it's way O/T to get into the nitty-gritty details, which I'm not overly familiar with anyway since I haven't read the papers detailing said theory.
Given that large hail requires the presence of a thunderstorm and its associated intense electromagnetic fields and proliferation of ions (whether positively or negatively charged), using ions to prevent hail seems like an exercise in futility at best.
Hailstones less than golf-ball sized usually don't dent, scratch, chip, or otherwise mar in any way the paint job on a vehicle. My friends and I have driven through enough hail while storm-chasing to know...just don't tell the insurance company.;-)
Hailstones form inside the thundercloud, and grow larger as they are suspended by the thunderstorm's updraft or recycled through it. Clear ice in a hailstone corresponds to growth in warmer regions of the cloud where the water has time to flow before freezing, cloudy ice corresponds to ice formation in colder regions of the cloud where the water freezes on contact.
These guys have seriously been had. Anyone that knows anything about atmospheric physics can tell you that most atmospheric models neglect sound waves, and for a very good reason--because they are insignificant when compared with other phenomena present in the atmosphere, such as...surprise...wind. Anything on the scale of a severe thunderstorm strong enough to produce golf-ball sized hail or larger will have vertical air motions in excess of 40-50 m/s (100mph). Combine this with the tremendous amount of turbulence associated with such violent vertical motions, and a few piddly sound waves don't stand a chance.
Furthermore, hailstones of the size they're concerned with usually form miles from the location they actually fall in, and are held aloft for substantial periods of time--sometimes longer than an hour. Eventually, however, the updraft in the storm will weaken or reposition itself, and when it does, look out below. So even assuming this device could prevent hail from forming within a 1-mile radius of itself, your stuff is still gonna get the crap beat out of it anyway.
Whether the guy that sold them on this was a meteorologist or not, this sort of crockery is what gives meteorologists a bad name.
It sounds to me like you may have the RenderAccel option enabled (Nvidia's docs call it "experimental"). Look in your XF86Config for it and make sure it is turned off as follows:
I've got an AthlonXP 2100+ and can run an 84-hour forecast using the MM5 in 2 1/2 hours. The domain is the continental US (plus some buffering around the CONUS, such as southern canada, parts of the atlantic/pacific, etc.), with a 40km gridpoint spacing and 30 vertical levels.
By contrast, the Eta model run by NCEP currently runs at 12km grid spacing with around 100 vertical levels (I believe), but the key is that the forecast from a 40km model run and a 12km model run usually differ very little, though the 12km run will have a little better resolution and may be a little more useful as a result. If the model runs have a resolution much better than 12km, however, you start running into problems where events like individual thunderstorms are explicitly resolved in the models' physics, as opposed to simply being "parameterized" (i.e., triggered in the model when certain larger-scale, favorable features are present). This sounds all well and good, but unfortunately the models are notoriously bad at explicitly resolving small-scale features like thunderstorms--much work needs to be done in this area.
In short, the average person can run their own weather model on their PC with no problems whatsoever, it no longer requires a supercomputer to do so. Good luck getting very skillful results beyond days 5-7 in your forecast, though.
Who cares about OpenOffice or any other "Word Processor" when you have LYX? I know, I know, all the pointy heads use Office, blah blah blah...but nevertheless...:-)
Re:the 1999 Tornado killed because it was so huge
on
Surviving Tornadoes
·
· Score: 1
It is quite possible that the 1999 Moore tornado was actually not the most violent tornado of the day, which may easily have been the tornado that hit the town of Mulhall (just north of Oklahoma City) a couple hours later. That tornado was much larger and quite possibly even stronger (the storm looked even more devastating on radar than the Moore storm did). Mulhall, however, is a small town with few structures, so that tornado hardly made the news and didn't have the opportunity to obliterate a large portion of a densely populated area like the Moore tornado did. The Mulhall tornado, as a result, produced damage that was only rated F4.
Re:the 1999 Tornado killed because it was so huge
on
Surviving Tornadoes
·
· Score: 1
Technically, the Fujita scale ranges from F0 (strong winds with light damage comparable to severe thunderstorm straight-line winds) to F12 (supersonic!!). Problem is, F5 damage is typically defined as being "nothing left but a bare foundation", so unless a tornado moved through a large metro area and made mincemeat of some skyscrapers or other buildings much stronger than the average house, we have no way of classifying damage as being F6. Furthermore, the windspeed the mobile doppler radar detected on May 3, 1999 was some hundreds of meters above ground, and not actually at ground level where damage is assessed, where the actual windspeeds were likely significantly lower due to friction at the surface. And finally, we have no way of really knowing what damage is correlated with what windspeed...at best it's simply an educated guess.
The Fujita scale is not perfect and is a crude way of classifying tornado damage at best (we have no real way of classifying tornadoes at all), but it's the best thing we have at present.
Hey, I'll take a tornado any day (that is, so long as it avoids tearing up people's stuff). I mean, why would anyone want to avoid such an awesome spectacle? Tell me there's a good storm outside and it'll be awhile before you see me again.:-)
> > However, the radar can rarely (if ever?) tell for certain if a rotation in a storm is actually a tornado or if it is on the ground
> Actually to be entirely technical only when a funnel cloud touches down on the ground is it called a tornado... prior to that it's called a funnel cloud
Technically, a tornado is defined as a circulation extending from ground level to the base of a thunderstorm. A funnel cloud need not be present for this to occur.
>...Earth does act much like a closed system, as the wattage of the sun is pretty much constant.
That's normally assumed to be the case because we have little idea as to how much slight changes in insolation affect the earth's climate nor any way of really determining what variations in insolation the earth experienced in the past.
The questions regarding the effects of variations in insolation are many, the answers few.
...and got 40,000 more search results (10,010,000 to 10,050,000). "Of" isn't included in the original search anyway, so I wonder why removing it yields a different estimate.
Slashdot Mirror
I can indeed say "corporate welfare". And I detest it, except in rare situations where it's the lesser of two evils and the alternative would negatively impact the public, as in the late 1980's with Unisys...they were about to go bankrupt and were bailed out by the government so the NEXRAD network could be completed without having to out for bid again, a decade-long process the first time around. Well, even then I detest it, but in situations like that there's not a lot you can do about it. Today, Unisys provides some of the most hideous "services" available, and have continually worked to keep all sorts of data to themselves (such as NEXRAD data, which eventually failed, fortunately). I think it's only a matter of time before they go under, this time for good.
It's available real-time for a fee due to the bandwidth necessary to download it, only archived data is currently available for free. Unless you're aware of some public location where you can download live Level II, in which case please let me know! :-)
No doubt a great deal of his concern is also over having to re-write a bunch of their application code to accomodate the new formats, in addition to lowering the level of obscure knowledge future competition needs to succeed.
Basically, there is no benefit to updating the formats for old companies like Accu-Weather, thus it's not surprising they would oppose the change. Newer/future businesses, by contrast, will welcome it, as it eases the data-acquisition and interpretation process...not to mention the fact that it makes it easier for TV stations, individuals, etc., to create their own products. My view is that if the reasonably-knowledgeable individual can perform this task, then perhaps the degreed meteorologists (particularly ones with graduate degrees) should be doing something which makes better use of their advanced skills. We may be in the beginning phases of a structural shift within the field of private meteorology, one shifting away from simply providing data and towards providing advanced data analysis. One way or another, seeking industry protection from the government instead of getting off the collective corporate butt and innovating, is the surest route towards declining revenues and unprofitability I can think of. The history books are littered with businesses that stagnated using the protectionist approach, and the history books will be littered with many more (Accu-Weather likely being a prime target if they refuse to put forth the effort to innovate).
Luckily, this data structure change has been in the works for years, and there is probably little Accu-Weather can do about it, as it would negatively impact the NWS since they've already written their next-generation visualization tools using XML, etc. Their current toolset is really starting to show its age, they can't be stuck with it forever. Also, with the NOAAPORT upgrade currently being implemented, anyone with a DirectTV-style satellite dish and a PC will be able to host their own real-time meteorological database. They're even planning on feeding live Level II NEXRAD data across it, which is pretty amazing given the amount of data that represents (about 100GB/day)! So even given a worst-case scenario where most internet access to NWS products is disabled, it really won't take much to access more data than even most businesses, let alone any one individual, could possibly know what to do with.
What I'd like to see from the open-source community are more tools to access the weather data we currently have. Any information you want (short of Level II NEXRAD data, due to bandwidth issues) is available real-time, today. There are almost no applications to deal with it, though. I've often thought of writing tools to do so, but other commitments, combined with little experience writing GUI applications (let alone visualization software), have kept me from following through.
Sounds like you had some severe hail, then.
Actually, I live in one of the most climatologically favored locations for damaging hail--central Oklahoma. I never meant to insinuate that large hail is not something to be concerned about, but rather to point out that its relative rarety can easily explain why there would be anecdotal "evidence" that claims these devices actually work.
That doesn't mean the system actually works, since damaging hail is very rare, even in the most hail-prone locations. Earlier incarnations of "hail cannons" have been around since the 1800s, when they shot random garbage skyward into thunderstorms...so ironically, whether or not the storm actually did anything, they were guaranteed a hail of trash (often nuts/bolts, things of that nature which were actually quite dangerous).
Unless Nissan uses Rust-O-Leum to paint their cars, in my experience you need severe hail (defined by the National Weather Service as 0.75" in diameter) at the very *least* to do anything to the paint job of an automobile. I've never seen hail less than about 1 1/2" leave any visible mark on a car, and I've seen plenty of hail. If I had just brought a brand-new Mercedes, I would have no problems with driving it through a hailstorm with a maximum hail size of 1". It sounds really bad when it's hitting your car, but doesn't do anything.
To clarify, I wasn't "quoting energy amounts", but rather pointing out that in the equations of motion, the term representing sound waves is insignificant (by many orders of magnitude) when compared to terms representing quantities such as advection (wind), vorticity (turbulence), etc. In other words, any "effect" from this device would be nothing more than white noise in the grand scheme of things (no pun intended). Not to mention the fact that thunder--which occurs even more frequently than 5-6 sec in many storms, can be heard from farther away, and is associated with electromagnetic fields & ion counts the makers of this device can only dream of--sure seems to stop all that hail.
Speak for yourself, some of us have years of experience in the field.
The electromagnetic forces inside a thunderstorm are mind-bogglingly intense because of the fact that air is such a great insulator, so shooting ions more than a few meters into the air, let alone into the bowels of a storm, is not something that sounds at all feasible to me. I suppose it might be possible to induce a lightning strike as the ions build up near the unit (whether actively through intervention or passively through natural forces is probably a matter of debate), but then as soon as it gets hit its "usefulness" will quickly come to an end anyway.
As an aside, lightning is generally believed to occur due to charge separation inside the storm due to cloud microphysics, with positive charge accumulating near the ground, possibly partly due to friction from rain. What actually triggers the lightning strike is unknown, though one theory that has recently been gaining some traction proposes that cosmic rays cause a sudden breakdown in the electrical resistance of air which rapidly snowballs (over the course of a fraction of a second), allowing lightning to occur. Obviously things are a bit more complicated than that, but it's way O/T to get into the nitty-gritty details, which I'm not overly familiar with anyway since I haven't read the papers detailing said theory.
Given that large hail requires the presence of a thunderstorm and its associated intense electromagnetic fields and proliferation of ions (whether positively or negatively charged), using ions to prevent hail seems like an exercise in futility at best.
...especially since hail is never associated with thunderstorms.
Hailstones less than golf-ball sized usually don't dent, scratch, chip, or otherwise mar in any way the paint job on a vehicle. My friends and I have driven through enough hail while storm-chasing to know...just don't tell the insurance company. ;-)
Hailstones form inside the thundercloud, and grow larger as they are suspended by the thunderstorm's updraft or recycled through it. Clear ice in a hailstone corresponds to growth in warmer regions of the cloud where the water has time to flow before freezing, cloudy ice corresponds to ice formation in colder regions of the cloud where the water freezes on contact.
These guys have seriously been had. Anyone that knows anything about atmospheric physics can tell you that most atmospheric models neglect sound waves, and for a very good reason--because they are insignificant when compared with other phenomena present in the atmosphere, such as...surprise...wind. Anything on the scale of a severe thunderstorm strong enough to produce golf-ball sized hail or larger will have vertical air motions in excess of 40-50 m/s (100mph). Combine this with the tremendous amount of turbulence associated with such violent vertical motions, and a few piddly sound waves don't stand a chance.
Furthermore, hailstones of the size they're concerned with usually form miles from the location they actually fall in, and are held aloft for substantial periods of time--sometimes longer than an hour. Eventually, however, the updraft in the storm will weaken or reposition itself, and when it does, look out below. So even assuming this device could prevent hail from forming within a 1-mile radius of itself, your stuff is still gonna get the crap beat out of it anyway.
Whether the guy that sold them on this was a meteorologist or not, this sort of crockery is what gives meteorologists a bad name.
It sounds to me like you may have the RenderAccel option enabled (Nvidia's docs call it "experimental"). Look in your XF86Config for it and make sure it is turned off as follows:
Option "RenderAccel" "off"
I've got an AthlonXP 2100+ and can run an 84-hour forecast using the MM5 in 2 1/2 hours. The domain is the continental US (plus some buffering around the CONUS, such as southern canada, parts of the atlantic/pacific, etc.), with a 40km gridpoint spacing and 30 vertical levels.
By contrast, the Eta model run by NCEP currently runs at 12km grid spacing with around 100 vertical levels (I believe), but the key is that the forecast from a 40km model run and a 12km model run usually differ very little, though the 12km run will have a little better resolution and may be a little more useful as a result. If the model runs have a resolution much better than 12km, however, you start running into problems where events like individual thunderstorms are explicitly resolved in the models' physics, as opposed to simply being "parameterized" (i.e., triggered in the model when certain larger-scale, favorable features are present). This sounds all well and good, but unfortunately the models are notoriously bad at explicitly resolving small-scale features like thunderstorms--much work needs to be done in this area.
In short, the average person can run their own weather model on their PC with no problems whatsoever, it no longer requires a supercomputer to do so. Good luck getting very skillful results beyond days 5-7 in your forecast, though.
A 30% chance of rain means that the forecaster believes that 30% of the forecast area will receive measurable (>= .01") rainfall.
Who cares about OpenOffice or any other "Word Processor" when you have LYX? I know, I know, all the pointy heads use Office, blah blah blah...but nevertheless... :-)
It is quite possible that the 1999 Moore tornado was actually not the most violent tornado of the day, which may easily have been the tornado that hit the town of Mulhall (just north of Oklahoma City) a couple hours later. That tornado was much larger and quite possibly even stronger (the storm looked even more devastating on radar than the Moore storm did). Mulhall, however, is a small town with few structures, so that tornado hardly made the news and didn't have the opportunity to obliterate a large portion of a densely populated area like the Moore tornado did. The Mulhall tornado, as a result, produced damage that was only rated F4.
Technically, the Fujita scale ranges from F0 (strong winds with light damage comparable to severe thunderstorm straight-line winds) to F12 (supersonic!!). Problem is, F5 damage is typically defined as being "nothing left but a bare foundation", so unless a tornado moved through a large metro area and made mincemeat of some skyscrapers or other buildings much stronger than the average house, we have no way of classifying damage as being F6. Furthermore, the windspeed the mobile doppler radar detected on May 3, 1999 was some hundreds of meters above ground, and not actually at ground level where damage is assessed, where the actual windspeeds were likely significantly lower due to friction at the surface. And finally, we have no way of really knowing what damage is correlated with what windspeed...at best it's simply an educated guess.
The Fujita scale is not perfect and is a crude way of classifying tornado damage at best (we have no real way of classifying tornadoes at all), but it's the best thing we have at present.
Hey, I'll take a tornado any day (that is, so long as it avoids tearing up people's stuff). I mean, why would anyone want to avoid such an awesome spectacle? Tell me there's a good storm outside and it'll be awhile before you see me again. :-)
> > However, the radar can rarely (if ever?) tell for certain if a rotation in a storm is actually a tornado or if it is on the ground
> Actually to be entirely technical only when a funnel cloud touches down on the ground is it called a tornado... prior to that it's called a funnel cloud
Technically, a tornado is defined as a circulation extending from ground level to the base of a thunderstorm. A funnel cloud need not be present for this to occur.
> ...Earth does act much like a closed system, as the wattage of the sun is pretty much constant.
That's normally assumed to be the case because we have little idea as to how much slight changes in insolation affect the earth's climate nor any way of really determining what variations in insolation the earth experienced in the past.
The questions regarding the effects of variations in insolation are many, the answers few.
It's unlikely the google dance is occurring now:
http://dance.efactory.de/
Besides, it shouldn't cause different results from the same server.
...and got 40,000 more search results (10,010,000 to 10,050,000). "Of" isn't included in the original search anyway, so I wonder why removing it yields a different estimate.