Tickle Me Elmo

President Obama announced an initiative to recognize the achievements of scientists and engineers, where an annual science fair will be held at the White House. I mean that's great, finally scientists getting some recognition for their achievements. But what got me was the picture that accompanied the article. Elmo is evidently the spokesperson for science and engineering in America. Terrific. We're taking science very seriously here folks.

Get off my damn lawn!

I have a great idea for a blog that would no doubt be much more popular than this blog. The content of the blog would just be professors and teachers posting e-mails they get from students. Because frankly the e-mails that I have gotten from students are so lacking in etiquette that they are almost funny. There is almost never a salutation, no "Dear Professor X" or no "Dear Sir" or anything like that. No greeting. Then there is usually no signature, or no ending to the e-mail. The words just stop. And often there is no actual request. Just a statement or comment that its left to you as the course instructor to figure out the question. For example:

I can't find where the HW folder is located. I looked under assignments and it's empty.

Thanks,
[name redacted]

Awesome! But what of it? Do you want to know where the homework is? Or are you just letting me know that there is no homework in the assignment folder?

I also enjoyed this one:

the power point is saved as .pptx it need to be re saved as .ppt or it wont convert for mac computers.... please resave as.ppt

Note that there is no salutation and no proper ending to the e-mail. Who sent this? And I love the statement "it need to be re saved" so instead of the student installing the patch that converts .pptx to .ppt, the instructor needs to re-save all of the powerpoint files. What a sense of entitlement! How about you show up to class and take notes!

I think this is the first sign of me getting old and crotchety, but I really can't stand e-mails that lack any semblance of etiquette.

Open Space on Long Island

Above: New York's pre-eminent open space, the Fulton Lakes Chain in the Adirondacks.

WSHU had an interesting story about open space on Long Island, and why we should care about it:

http://www.wshu.org/news/story.php?ID=6692

The report mentions that Suffolk County is buying up farm land to preserve as open space. More such open space would have been persevered if the Open Space proposal hadn't been defeated by voters this past fall.

New Yankee Stadium Home Runs Not Necessarily Related to Weather

Yesterday AccuWeather via their blog put forth a hypothesis that the well documented increase in home runs at the new Yankee Stadium was due to a change in the stadium’s shape, allowing for west winds to enter and exit the stadium at a high speed and the proper angle to turn lazy fly balls into home runs. More specifically:

The wind on Saturday during the Yankees' 22-4 loss against the Cleveland Indians was mostly from the west at 15-20 mph. Given the layout of the stadium, the wind could have had an effect on fly balls in right field. Six home runs were hit by the Indians in the second inning alone.

Although the field dimensions of the new stadium are exactly that of the old stadium, the shell of the new stadium is shaped differently. AccuWeather.com meteorologists also estimate that the angle of the seating tiers in the new stadium could have a different effect on wind motion across the field.

Note the lack of scientific explanation for the statements in the article. Notice how many times words like mostly, could, estimate are used in the paragraphs. No modeling, or observational studies were used. Let me translate that for you into plain English, “hey we watched the game on Fox on Saturday and it sure looked like the wind was blowing the ball hard, maybe it’s the new stadium?” Look it seems like a reasonable hypothesis and all, especially watching some of those pop flies end up as home runs on Saturday, but it’s just a theory and the accuweather story struck me as being less science and more guessing. I was frustrated that a weather company would present this theory with only one games worth of wind data as as motivating observation.

So I wanted to test their theory with a bit of weather data to see if it holds any water. The methods are explained below and the study includes only six games the four versus the Indians this past weekend and two exhibition games versus the Cubs in early April. The chart shows the number of home runs hit each game, the mean direction of the wind and the wind speed. First note, only three of the six games hosted at Yankee Stadium so far had a west wind. So three of the games played so far had winds not out of the west, and often out of the opposite direction (east), which would by the accuweather theory suppress home runs. In each of these games where the wind was not out of the west, 3 home runs were hit.


Table 1. The above table shows the average wind direction, and speed for games at Yankee Stadium so far in 2009. See the methods section below for details.

During games with a west wind, 8, 6 and 5 home runs were hit, each a significant amount of home runs for a MLB game. But might these home runs be due to the players involved in the game and not the weather? I’m not a saberatician so excuse my clumsy attempt to convince you that there is just as good a chance that the HR’s were due to good offences hitting against struggling pitching as there is a chance that the wind was directly responsible for the home runs. Cleveland lead the American League in runs scored after the all-star break last year and is #2 in runs scored in this young season. During the west wind games this high powered offense was coupled with some exceptionally poor pitching. Of those three games with a west wind, two of them were started by Chien Ming Wang who has for a lack of a better word been awful both at Yankee Stadium and away so far this year. Other pitchers starting in these high home run games were Fausto Carmona (5.85 ERA in 2008, 7.87 ERA in 2009) served up 4 HR, Anthony Reyes (5.73 ERA in 2009, was lights out in second half of 2009) served up 3 HR while Joba Chamberlain (5.60 ERA in 2009 and 2.60 ERA in 2008 and arguably the best pitcher of the crew) only allowed 1 HR. Relievers who served up home runs include minor league pitcher Anthony Claggett who appeared to be overmatched, Jose Veras, Edward Ramirez, Zack Jackson and Jenson Lewis whos ERA’s range from 5.79 to 43.20 this year. Johan Santana, Tim Lincecum, Brandon Webb and Mariano Rivera these pitchers are not.

It’s too early to draw any conclusions from the weather data presented above. But it’s clear that a number of factors not related to the weather may have resulted in the home run deluge, and we can’t say for sure if the west wind is the cause of the HR deluge:

• The accuweather hypothesis appears to be at best an untested guess, not based on modeling studies or scientific observation.


• Winds have been equally out of the west as other directions, thus they can’t directly explain the deluge of runs and home runs scored over the weekend.


• More home runs have been hit when there is a west wind at Yankee Stadium than when the wind has been from the east or south.


• In the games with west winds the pitching has been poor, pitched either by pitchers who do not have demonstrated long term records of being above league average or are who are clearly struggling so far this season.


• Cleveland and the Yankees are amongst the two best offensive teams in the American League


• At this point there is not sufficient data to prove whether or not wind direction is statistically tied to home runs.

As Peter Abraham pointed out in his blog today, it’s too early to rush to judgment, the Yankees and opponents hit 20 HR in a four game series last year as well! It’s a neat theory to tie wind direction to HR production, but I think it’s irresponsible for accuweather to claim that the west wind is leading to these home runs. We’ll have to see what the numbers bare out this summer, and draw conclusions after a sufficient sample size has been drawn.

Methods. I calculated the mean wind direction, wind speed and air temperature at LaGuardia Airport from raw METAR code taken from the Plymouth State Weather Data Archive. LaGuardia Aiport was chosen to represent conditions in the Bronx due to the well documented problems with the Central Park observation site. The averages were calculated for the hours of the game, based on data taken from box scores, except during the exhibition games vs. the Cubs where length was estimated to be 4 hours.


Table 2. As per table 1, but includes standard deviation and temperature data as well.

Environmentalist Pirates?

Does the current bout of piracy in the Indian Ocean have its roots in environmental activism?

In February of 2005 the United Nations announced that containers filled with radioactive materials, industrial and medical waste had washed ashore in Somalia.

A United Nations' report released this week says nuclear and hazardous wastes dumped on Somalia's shores had been scattered by the recent Asian tsunami and are now infecting Somalis in coastal areas.

A spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Nick Nuttall, told VOA that for the past 15 years or so, European companies and others have used Somalia as a dumping ground for a wide array of nuclear and hazardous wastes.

"There's uranium radioactive waste, there's leads, there's heavy metals like cadmium and mercury, there's industrial wastes, and there's hospital wastes, chemical wastes, you name it,” he said. “It's not rocket science to know why they're doing it because of the instability there."

Mr. Nuttall said, on average, it cost European companies $2.50 per ton to dump the wastes on Somalia's beaches rather than $250 a ton to dispose of the wastes in Europe.

Recently a Somali ex-patriot named K’Nann posted on the internet explaining why the Somali people did not oppose the piracy that is rampant along their coasts.

Already by this time, local fishermen in the coastline of Somalia have been complaining of illegal vessels coming to Somali waters and stealing all the fish. And since there was no government to report it to, and since the severity of the violence clumsily overshadowed every other problem, the fishermen went completely unheard.

But it was around this same time that a more sinister, a more patronizing practice was being put in motion. A Swiss firm called Achair Parterns, and an Italian waste company called Achair Parterns, made a deal with Ali Mahdi, that they were to dump containers of waste material in Somali waters. These European companies were said to be paying Warlords about $3 a ton, whereas to properly dispose of waste in Europe costs about $1000 a ton.

….

The UN envoy for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, says that the practice still continues to this day. It was months after those initial reports that local fishermen mobilized themselves, along with street militias, to go into the waters and deter the Westerners from having a free pass at completely destroying Somalia's aquatic life. Now years later, the deterring has become less noble, and the ex-fishermen with their militias have begun to develop a taste for ransom at sea. This form of piracy is now a major contributor to the Somali economy, especially in the very region that private toxic waste companies first began to burry our nation's death trap.

Mr. K’Nann is suggesting that current piracy have its roots in residents who were determined to protect their fishing rights and their waters from pollution. In the years following the start of dumping the effort has gone from something justifiable, to villainous. While this is likely a major simplification of events, it’s just interesting to note that this major geopolitical problem may have its roots in environmental degradation.

Could a Long Island Offshore Windfarm Disrupt Weather Radars?

Above, A marks the spot of a wind farm in central Wisconsin that is disrupting weather radars, making forecasting all the more challenging. Image source: Google Maps.

Saw a great article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently about a large wind farm disrupting weather radar capabilities in central Wisconsin. We’ve talked a lot about the benefits of wind power, especially in rural areas, to generating clean electricity. Here is a demonstrated negative consequence of large wind farm installations.

The National Weather Service has issued a new kind of warning because of a Dodge County wind farm that is disrupting the agency's ability to monitor storms in southeastern Wisconsin.

The wind farm's giant turbines - each as wide as a football field and as tall as a 20-story building - are sending false storm signals to the government's weather radar system.

Weather service officials say they see no significant public safety threat, although they say the wind farm has caused radar interference and could confuse some storm watchers.

Meteorologist Marc Kavinsky said the approaching summer storm season will be the federal agency's first opportunity to gauge the wind farm's full impact.
"It'll be interesting," he said. "I'm hoping the effects will be minimal."
Located just outside the Dodge County community of Iron Ridge, the wind farm includes 36 turbines that began operating over the past few months, generating electricity for several surrounding communities.

The farm is about 30 miles north of the National Weather Service office in Sullivan, which provides radar coverage and severe weather alerts across a 125-mile radius that includes all of southeastern Wisconsin.

The meteorologist, Marc Kavinsky, who was quoted in the article has a great website demonstrating the effects of these tremendous blades on Doppler radar returns.

His key implications of the wind farms on radar returns were:

• Thunderstorm or winter storm characteristics could be masked or misinterpreted, reducing warning effectiveness in the vicinity of the wind farm.

• False signatures contaminating Doppler velocity data in the vicinity of the wind energy facility could reduce forecaster's situational awareness, particularly
during hazardous/severe weather events.

• False precipitation estimates could negatively impact flash-flood warning effectiveness.

To summarize the above, the false returns negatively affect the weather services’ ability to forecast for severe events, like thunderstorms, tornadoes and flooding rains. While this would be a major concern in the Midwest where severe weather associated with thunderstorms is common, how important would it be here in the New York region? Let’s try to anticipate the effects of a wind farm 10 miles off of the south coast of Long Island, as has previously been proposed.


The figure above shows how topography coupled with an extremely high wind farm affects weather radards. Source: National Weather Service.

The figure above shows why the wind farm in Wisconsin is so effective in disrupting the radar signals. The radar beam is tilted up, generally in the neighborhood of 0.5 to 3.5 degrees, and in this case the beam intersects the windfarm because the terrain is sloping upward along the beam path. If the ground was flat, the windfarm would go undetected by radar. How would this work in the New York region?

The NWS Doppler radar that serves the New York region is sited on Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island. A conservative estimate of the height of the Doppler radar is 250 feet above mean sea level. Using Google earth software I calculated the distance from the radar to Fire Island on the south shore of Long Island to be about 8.6 miles. Plan for the windfarm had it to be placed about 12 miles off shore, so let’s estimate the closest possible distance between windfarms and the Doppler radar to be 20 miles (even though in the planning stage the windfarm was located futher west, increasing the distance between radar and windfarm). Next step, figure out the height of the proposed windfarm. Taking the extreme of a 20 story windfarm at 15 feet a story, we come up with a height of 300 feet. With the lowest angle (0.5) of the radar, 20 miles away the beam would be about 528’ above where it started and with the highest angle (3.5) it would be 3696’ above the ground where it started. If you ignore radar beam broadening and throw in a ground elevation of somewhere near 250’ the beam would be 775’ to 4000’ above sea level by the time it reached the windfarm.

Bottom line, a wind farm 20 miles away from the Doppler Radar would require a height of at least 775’ to interfere with Doppler radars offshore in the New York region. While wind farm interference is a problem given the complicated topography of central Wisconsin, it will likely be not be an issue with an offshore farm in the New York region.

Science in the Media

I study mineral dust that is blown by the wind from continent to continent. There was an episode of CSI or Law & Order in which a suspect was caught by matching dust found on their boot to dust found at a crime scene. I found myself thinking, "wow it's taken me a year and a half to come up with a method to source dust, and they pulled it off in 3 hours!" The technology and science used on those shows is humorous to those of us actually trying to perform it. I think the sentiment was caught nicely by this cartoon from Jorge Cham of phdcomics.com:



Above Image Credit: "Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham. www.phdcomics.com.

Anyone have any similar stories to tell about tv shows solving their research topic in three hours?