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Comment Re:Use multiple weather apps (Score 2) 57

There are aggregators at the pro level (e.g. NAEFS and TIGGE). Disagreement is good provided verification falls in that distribution at the correct rate. E.g., if you have a reliable forecast distribution, it better rain 10% of the time when you put out a 10% probability of precipitation, no matter how it makes people whine that forecasts are "unreliable." That's just statistical ignorance.

Comment Re:Sounds like a Type-A problem for AI/ML, no? (Score 2) 57

ML is used widely for these apps. They are mainly stripping bias from NCEP/ECMWF grids and downscaling from those grids to points. Easy and effective, most of the time. The edge cases (extreme events) are where details in the forecast really matter, and edge cases are where ML is notoriously weak in going outside training. This is why the NWS local offices have not gone away, because experts matter most when lives and property are on the line.
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Playboy Launches Safe For Work Website 98

If you're one of the three people in the world who actually reads Playboy for the articles, today is your lucky day. Every young boy's favorite magazine to find in their uncle's closet has launched a "safe for work" website. From the article: "TheSmokingJacket.com will contain none of the nudity that makes Playboy.com NSFW — not suitable for work. Instead, it'll rely on humor to reach Playboy's target audience, men 25 to 34 years old, when they are most likely to be in front of a computer screen."

Comment Re:sure, sure. (Score 2, Insightful) 464

You can't plot the weather here on Earth more than 3 days from now accurately, but you expect us to believe you can plot the sun's weather 2 years from now?

I call BS.

We know arbitrarily far in advance that winter is colder on average than summer. Similarly, we can forecast the timing of solar-cycle peaks pretty well out into the future. I.e, this forecast based on climatology, not an initial value problem (weather; chaotic).

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Websites That Don't Need to Be Made Anymore 161

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but there is a finite number of social networking or selling websites that the world needs. Here is a collection of the eight kinds of websites that absolutely don't need to be made anymore. I'd add dating sites and anybody who uses pop-up ads myself, but I think that would eliminate half the Web.

Comment Re:earthly parallels to the Spot? (Score 1) 86

Basically, Earth's size, rotation rate, and stratification only support 1-2 jet streams, and there is a lot of variability. This variability, and the strong wave-radiative potential near the jet streams does not allow large-scale coherent structure to persist for "long" periods of time. Jupiter supports many jets having nearly fixed positions, which allows coherent material eddies to persist without disruption in the mixing layers between the jets.

Earth has similar eddies, on shorter timescales, in both the atmosphere and ocean. Examples include warm and cold rings in the ocean, and "cut-off" cyclones in the atmosphere. There are also less well-known vortices over the arctic that are apparent in analyses of the tropopause. Examples can be found here (try the loop feature to see the motion of vortices over the arctic):

http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~hakim/tropo/

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