Category Archives: spatial statistics
California Marine Debris Prevention: Banning Plastic Bags is Not Enough
NOAA has a full page of videos on marine debris and how to prevent it. The state of California has a 2018 plan on preventing marine debris. Here are some highlights. There is a good deal more in the report, … Continue reading
Procrustes tangent distance is better than SNCD
I’ve written two posts here on using a Symmetrized Normalized Compression Divergence or SNCD for comparing time series. One introduced the SNCD and described its relationship to compression distance, and the other applied the SNCD to clustering days at a … Continue reading
Sampling: Rejection, Reservoir, and Slice
An article by Suilou Huang for catatrophe modeler AIR-WorldWide of Boston about rejection sampling in CAT modeling got me thinking about pulling together some notes about sampling algorithms of various kinds. There are, of course, books written about this subject, … Continue reading
“Bigger Isn’t Always Better When It Comes to Data”: Barry Nussbaum
The President’s Corner in the May 2017 issue of Amstat News, the monthly newsletter of the American Statistical Association (“ASA”), features the interesting exposition by environmental statistician and President of the ASA, Barry Nussbaum, called “Bigger isn’t always better when … Continue reading
Why scientific measurements need to be adjusted
There is an excellent piece in Ars Technica about why scientific measurements need to be adjusted, and the implications of this for climate data. It is written by Scott K Johnson and is called “Thorough, not thoroughly fabricated: The truth … Continue reading
“All models are wrong. Some models are useful.” — George Box
(Image courtesy of the Damien Garcia.) As a statistician and quant, I’ve thought hard about that oft-cited Boxism. I’m not sure I agree. It’s not that there is such a thing as a perfect model, or correct model, whatever in … Continue reading
“Getting our heads out of the sand: The facts about sea level rise” (Robert Young)
If current luck holds, North Carolina may well escape the 2013 hurricane season without the widespread damage that has so frequently plagued the fragile coastal region in recent years. Unfortunately, this brief respite is almost certainly only that — a … Continue reading
Repaired R code for Markov spatial simulation of hurricane tracks from historical trajectories
I’m currently studying random walk and diffusion processes and their connections with random fields. I’m interested in this because at the core of dynamic linear models, Kalman filters, and state-space methods there is a random walk in a parameter space. … Continue reading
Energy Democracy
I’ve actually written about this before, but John Farrell of the ILSR (“Institute for Local Self-Reliance” a famous Emerson essay, by the way) presents an up-to-date synthesis of developments, incorporating policy as well as Tony Seba-like, Hermann Scheer-like, and Michael … Continue reading
A model of an electrical grid: A vision
Many people seem to view the electrical grid of the future being much like the present one. I think a lot about networks, because of my job. And I especially think a lot about network topologies, although primarily concerning the … Continue reading
Bayesian blocks via PELT in R
The Bayesian blocks algorithm of Scargle, Jackson, Norris, and Chiang has an enthusiastic user community in astrostatistics, in data mining, and among some in machine learning. It is a dynamic programming algorithm (see VanderPlas referenced below) and, so, exhibits optimality … Continue reading
David Suzuki on Agroecology
See Feeding humanity in a warming world. Dr Suzuki links University of California, Berkeley, Professor Miguel Altieri’s “Principles and strategies for designing sustainable farming systems“.
“Solar power is contagious. These maps show how it spreads.” (from Vox)
Brad Plumer at Vox writes on take-up patterns of rooftop solar based upon a large dataset from SolarCity. The full article is available at the SolarCity site. Mr Plumer combines it with a report on other studies of solar adoption … Continue reading
Southern New England Meteorology Conference, 24th October 2015
I attending the 2015 edition of the Southern New England Meteorology Conference in Milton, MA, near the Blue Hill, and its Blue Hill Climatological Observatory, of which I am a member as we as of the American Meteorological Society. I … Continue reading
On differential localization of tumors using relative concentrations of ctDNA. Part 1.
Like most mammalian tissue, tumors often produce shards of DNA as a byproduct of cell death and fracture. This circulating tumor DNA is being studied as a means of detecting tumors or their resurgence after treatment. (See also a Q&A … Continue reading
How nice it is that Nature and probability bend to developers whims!
As I have mentioned before, it’s so nice that Nature and probability bend to the whims of property developers and their Town Fathers, with the willing participation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). If you had property at risk … Continue reading
Incredible Rainfall In South Carolina, and Yes Climate Played A Role – Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal – AGU Blogosphere
Make no mistake, this was a flood event unlike any other in South Carolina and while Hurricane Joaquin never hit the coast, it holds a smoking gun. This flood was the result of several factors, an … Source: Incredible Rainfall … Continue reading
Questions About El Nino Answered – Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal – AGU Blogosphere
Source: Questions About El Nino Answered – Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal – AGU Blogosphere
“Natural Gas Pipeline Replacement Programs Reduce Methane Leaks and Improve Consumer Safety”
Update, 2018-11-19 Pipeline replacements, yes, assuming they are done correctly. Otherwise, strand them. See “NTSB faults NiSource for deadly Massachusetts gas explosions“. NiSource is the parent company of Columbia Gas of Massachusetts. Here are the NTSB recommendations and report. Natural … Continue reading
Leaks in Westwood: Natural Gas — a bridge to nowhere
These are ongoing leaks of natural gas in the Westwood area. They are reported, as required by law, by Eversource, the local utility, to Massachusetts government authorities, along with an indication of Eversource’s estimate of the severity of the leak. … Continue reading
Your future: Antarctica, in detail
Climate and geophysical accuracy demands fine modeling grids, and very large supercomputers. The best and biggest supercomputers have not been available for climate work, until recently. Watch how results differ if fine meshes and big supercomputers are used. Why haven’t … Continue reading
Alice Bell’s “A very short history of climate change research”
“A very short history of climate change research“, by Alice Bell. The story of scientists discovering climate change is longer than many of us tend to imagine. We’ve had a sense that what humans do might effect the climate since … Continue reading
Thank You
Originally posted on Open Mind:
To all the readers who make this blog worth writing: Thank you. Thank you for sharing my work. One of the things that makes me proud is that often my blog posts are used as…
“NOAA temperature record updates and the ‘hiatus’” (Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate)
NOAA temperature record updates and the ‘hiatus’.
Destroying the Most Persistent Scientific Myth In America – Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal – AGU Blogosphere
Destroying the Most Persistent Scientific Myth In America – Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal – AGU Blogosphere.
“NOAA temperature record updates and the ‘hiatus’” (from Gavin at REALCLIMATE)
NOAA temperature record updates and the ‘hiatus’. No doubt there’ll be, as Dr Schmidt says, a howl of protests that the data are “being manipulated”. There’s more discussion by Professor Mann. But, more to the point, it looks like we’re … Continue reading
“Storm-proven forecasting gets yearlong trial”
Storm-studying scientists have made their next-generation forecasting system available online so the wider weather community can put it to the test. After using the real-time system during short-lived field research campaigns, developers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) … Continue reading
Twelvefold acceleration in Antarctic shelf ice loss over two decades
The story of Antarctic ice shelf melt continues to develop. A new report measures ice loss over the entire two Antarctic continents, finding a twelvefold acceleration in ice loss comparing the interval 2003-2012 to the interval 1994-2003. This is from … Continue reading