BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: EGU2018 Day 5

One final push…we were back on paleoclimate again first thing, more data than models though a bit of a mix of both. Just as the session ended and I started to think about going in search of lunch, lunch arrived in the form of sandwiches for the Atmospheric Sciences Division meeting. I usually attend the Climate Division meeting so thought it might be interesting to see if AS would have a different style. It didn’t really (even the sandwich was the same), and the most interesting points of discussion were rather similar – mostly, how to cope with the meeting outgrowing the available space. There’s no great solution and I am coming round to the idea that a slight discouragement towards throwing in too many abstracts might be the least-worst approach. There are of course ways round the one-abstract-per-first-author for anyone sufficiently motivated (like jules and I might be) but people who chuck in virtual duplicates to several sessions might be dissuaded which would be a good thing in terms of conference quality as well as freeing up space. I’m not sure it will make much difference overall though as surely there can’t be all that many of these cases. Some audience members also made the case for more remote participation and I don’t think the EGU can continue to resist this indefinitely. Attending in person brings greater benefits, but also costs, and allowing people to participate without the massive investment of time and money involved in travel could surely only be a good thing.

The afternoon sessions contained some advanced and high resolution modelling – a mix of future plans and existing results. Bjorn Stevens gave a well-received talk extolling the benefits of 1km resolution modelling. Mind you a bunch of high-resolution modellers is perhaps not the toughest crowd for that topic! There were some very truthy images of modelled clouds looking like reality. A particular goal of the highest resolution modelling is to resolve tropical storms and some of our past Japanese colleagues had some impressive results here too.

Previously the Friday afternoon slot has usually been a bit of a graveyard with lots of conference-goers leaving early for flights home, but now the schedule is so full there was even a busy poster session in the evening, including more of both the paleo and advanced numerical modelling. We hung around for the start of the convenors’ party but left quite early.

And now for the final score: jules says she had 9 free meals during the week, which were much higher quality than previously (so that’s where the EGU budget disappears to). As for myself, I attended 7 of the 3 meals to which I was actually invited. It seemed a particularly good week this time, perhaps partly due to our long absence. We last came 2 years ago when we were so ill and tired we only attended a fraction of the week, so this time there was rather a lot of new stuff. Jules was also involved in three sessions and we had a total of 4 presentations between us, which kept us busy across a wide range of topics. There was also an element of escapism for us in getting away from home for a bit, which we can now return to feeling (I hope) somewhat rejuvenated.

As for Day 6, we started off with a lovely sunny jog along the Donau Insel, and I’m pleased to report that my legs are now just about working properly after the marathon.

Some gentle sightseeing in town (see Belvedere above) was rounded off by a fabulous concert from the Vienna Philharmonic. I always check their schedule when we are at the EGU – more often than not they are either absent or sold out but this time we got prime seats for a concert including Elgar’s Cello Concerto by Sol Gabetta. We were so worn out by this stage that we forgot to check the venue and went to the wrong place, but fortunately the right place is only a short walk away. jules and I were amused to see a prominent EGU committee member taking photos in the concert hall just after the announcer had clearly forbidden such behaviour It looked rather like this:

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: EGU 2018 Day 4

Four days in and the fog is descending…not the weather which remains resolutely warm and sunny, but my mental state after on overload of science, food, drink, and long days. Nothing compelling at 8:30 so we had a morning jog and breakfast at the excellent cafe just outside our apartment. Possibly the best almond croissant ever, feeling a bit stupid for not discovering this place before as we’ve stayed in the same airbnb three times now. We’ve got some catching up to do!

There was a mathematical session at 10:30 covering a huge range of ideas. I was particularly looking forward to a talk that promised to explore the mathematics of emergent constraints. However it turned out to be a little more specialised than I had hoped, focussing in detail on the relationship of variability to long-term changes motivated by the recent Cox et al paper. Still lots of room for more to be done here.

Lunch was the GMD editorial board meeting. I’m happy to see GMD charging on successfully and jules will be stepping down from her Chief Exec position in due course. It’s no longer growing rapidly but seems to have stabilised at a reasonable level. I don’t think there is anything of great public interest to report. There will be a mobile version of the journal website launched soon.

Straight after lunch was jules’ climate sensitivity session. I’ve struggled to organise similar sessions in the past so it was great to see that this was packed with great talks and well attended too. Andrew Dessler gave a particularly good presentation on some of his work on interannual variability and also included the below graphic which is perhaps my biggest contribution to science this year. Perhaps I should have made a slightly less fuzzy green camera, it’s a bit low-resolution but never mind.

There is still a general prohibition on photography “unless the presenter authorizes it. Presenters are encouraged to inform the audience if they welcome photos.” Baby steps when compared to the blanket prohibition that has been in place in earlier years. People take photos all the time of course, it’s easier than writing a note these days if you want to take down a name/reference/idea/… Maria Rugenstein also gave a nice summary of er Longrun MIP analysis which I’ve seen some of before but which seems more complete now.

After tea I listened to Tim Palmer’s medal lecture. Tim sometimes gives interesting-but-controversial talks about wild idea relating to stochastic parameterisations, stochastic computing or his aims for a global climate centre, but this was more of a standard didactic history lesson on the growth of probabilistic prediction in numerical weather prediction. As such I knew most (but not all) of it and it was probably of wide interest but not hugely stimulating to me personally. The main message is that we should make probabilistic weather forecasts, and we already do, so that’s alright then.

jules and I had three posters to defend between us, slightly inconveniently arranged on three different (but at least neighbouring) rows. We had however discovered the best strategy for dealing with the 5:30 beer queue (thanks to a fortuitous coincidence on Monday) so at least were well fuelled for the occasion. Lots of interesting conversations ensued, at least that’s how I remember it. As well as taking about our own work there was time to visit the others in the sessions."Oh look here’s James to tell you why your poster is wrong" said one person as I wandered along which raises the question of how many others were thinking it

After posters we had the Copernicus 30y Birthday Party to attend. Copernicus is the admin/meetings/publications wing of the EGU (which was the EGS back then, if it wasn’t something else previous to that). To be honest I’m not sure exactly how it all fits together but it seems to work very well so I’m not too bothered. It was up on the top floor of one of the local office blocks close to the conference centre. There was plenty of food and drink to go round.

(Not sure why these last two pics are so fuzzy - something to do with how they originally appeared on the blueskies blog.)

2:48:44

Another year, another PB.

This year the marathon was scheduled for the Sunday immediately before the EGU. However we weren't committed to that so I entered anyway when they sent me an early bird discount offer. The Vienna marathon was also a week too late for a combined work/run trip.

Later on we started to think about the EGU trip, and realised that it was actually possible to run the marathon, go straight to the airport, and hop on a plane to Vienna. The marathon is on the south side of Manchester and really very close to the airport. Parking the van in the city centre can be difficult due to height barriers so rather than a hotel we found an airbnb in a residential area a couple of miles south of the race start which proved to be very convenient. There was even a fabulous pizza just down the road. Probably the best we've had this side of the Japan Sea, in fact. A proper soft chewy crust with a few crispy bits and plenty of topping.

Under usual circumstances, one between two would have been reasonable, but these were not usual circumstances! We staggered back and collapsed into bed.

Sunday morning dawned cold, cloudy and still. It would be hard to imagine a better day for a marathon. I forced down a bit more breakfast before packing up and heading off to the start. Didn't see anyone I recognised, but I hadn't really expected to. There was a club-mate somewhere a bit further back in the field but as I had last time I hopped the barrier close to the front and tried to position myself among other people aiming for a similar time. After a good winter of training I'd been starting to dream of the magic 2:45 (the threshold at which I could enter the Championship race at London and line up alongside people such as Bekele and Mo Farah etc) but didn't think it was that likely. 2:50, on the other hand, I was confident of beating, having come reasonably close to it last year. During training I had beaten my half marathon PB by about 100 seconds, which logically should be worth comfortably than 3 mins over a marathon. However, while the running had been going well, there had been a lot of other stuff happening that had meant I hadn't been sleeping well for a while. You never quite know what's going to happen on the day either.

So I set off around 2:47 pace, feeling ridiculously comfortable as you do when your legs are fresh after a gentle couple of weeks tapering. Settled into a comfortable pace, trying to stay in groups of similar speed. Seemed to be going well, I had dreams of a fast second half but made sure not to try too hard too early. I't do 20 miles or so, then sprint past everyone with a fast last 10k.

Around half-way there's a section where the course doubles back on itself and we saw the leaders coming back. Two Kenyans glided effortlessly past.

and then after what seemed like an age but was probably less than 30 seconds, a bunch of brits appeared. One of the Kenyans appears to have dropped out later but the other won by a few minutes. Only 2:21, the best runners aim for London of course.

Somewhere around this point I caught up with one of the elite female runners, and we ran together for a few miles. I later discovered that she had a best time of 2:37 and ran in both the Commonwealth Games and European Champs back in 2010. Not bad company to be keeping. Up to mile 20 and even a little beyond I was doing fine, but gradually things started to hurt - especially my left hip and leg which have been the weak spot before, so either I'm slightly weak on that side or slightly lopsided in running. The planned fast last 10k became a fast 4 miles then a fast 5k and although I did try pushing on the pace just a little bit at that point ("it's just a parkrun!"), I soon reverted to damage limitation and decided to just keep on plodding on in the hope that I wouldn't fall apart too badly. This worked pretty much ok, I did lose a minute over this section to Holly who kept on at a steady speed but that's not too bad in the great scheme of things. The two halves were 1:23:28 and 1:25:16 which is only a positive split of 1:48, a touch higher than ideal but hardly shameful. Despite this slowdown I did move up over 40 places in the second half.

Food and water worked fine again with my own bag of jelly babies and kendal mint cake washed down by the supplied bottles. I really wasn't hungry or under fuelled at all after the pizza though. Perhaps with hindsight I could have splashed on a bit more water towards the end of the race when I wasn't interested in drinking. Fixing the left leg problem might have the biggest impact. It isn't causing a problem now three days later so there isn't a real injury problem, it's just not quite as good as the other one. Oh, and a pair of magic nike sub-2 shoes though even finding a pair would be a bit of a miracle. A 3 min PB is a pretty big improvement at this stage in my running career and at this age, but one disappointment with my result is that I didn't get quite as much as half-way to 2:45. That still seems like it may be a step too far for me. We'll see...

Anyway, here is my official result and here it is on Strava:

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: EGU 2018 Day 3

jules was talking in the first session this morning (paleo data assimilation) so had to rush in a bit early. She was talking about our plans for reconstructing the last deglaciation (21ka to present). It seems to have gone ok, I was sitting in on the proper data assimilation session so didn’t get to hear it In a bizarre blast from the past, someone was talking about orthogonality of bred vectors and even mentioned that I’d done some work on that many years ago! I suppose that sort of makes up for when other people ostentatiously omit our work from their list of references despite it being one of the most obvious and seminal sources for the topic under discussion. Not that I’m bitter or anything. I expect it’s accidental some of the time.

Another free lunch thanks to an important discussion on policy matters at GMD. Not that I was part of the policy-making process, but I sneaked in along with the proper executive editors and ate all the food while they were talking I then went for a very gentle and slow run for reasons that will be made obvious in a future blog. Well, I mean the reasons for it being gentle and slow (other than being straight after lunch). The reason for doing the run at all is just that I wanted a bit of fresh air and there was nothing compelling in the program. We’ve always found it is impossible to do 5 full days anyway at such a big conference as this, no human brain can reasonably be expected to cope with that much science. I returned for some more paleoclimate stuff including a medal lecture from yet another old white man. I especially liked the way he managed to open by telling us all about the other medal he’d just been awarded by That Other Organisation. It was a good talk though and it’s not really fair to blame recipients for the limitations of the process. His talk concerned Dansgaard-Oeschger events, the massive rapid changes in climatic conditions that happened irregularly through colder periods in Earth’s recent paleoclimatic past. It’s still unclear exactly how and why they happen.

Evening posters were (as usual) related to the daytime talks, so more data assimilation of modern and paleo flavours, which kept us busy until it was time for dinner.

Over the years we’ve discovered some nice restaurants outside the most touristy bits which are reasonably quiet. Yesterday was the schnitzel, tonight was the turn of the Chinese. This pic is just the walk home though.

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: EGU 2018 Day 2

jules had a a 7:30 breakfast meeting today which didn’t seem very civilised to me. But it looks like it was worth getting up for.

A perk of being Executive Editor, but very little recompense really for the hours of work she puts into running GMD. I am pleased to confirm that the croissant that she smuggled out for me was excellent.

The day proper started with general paleo data/modelling stuff in a session that jules was co-convening. This was a little thin this year, especially on the modelling front, probably due to the forthcoming CMIP/PMIP experiments which will be underway around the world but which are not yet ready to report on. I probably should have paid more attention but was distracted by croissant crumbs.

Today’s free lunch was at the CL (climate) Division meeting. All seems to be sailing on fairly smoothly though the EGU is heading towards full capacity of the meeting venue and it’s not clear how best to address this. One new policy initiative that jules and I are not particularly keen on is the imposition of a limit to one submission per person as first author (a second submission would be allowed if you are actually invited to talk, but that’s fairly rare). We have 4 between us this year and rarely if ever have come with a bare one each – though to be fair last time we came 2 years ago jules had a invited talk and we only submitted one more one more each on top of that, so it’s not always going to be a huge problem. Also, the limit could be easily evaded by author padding which seems like an open invitation to ethically dubious behaviour. Another issue that generated some discussion is the prevalence of stale pale males in the higher echelons of the division hierarchy. Hard to blame the maleness of the president in particular on any institutional bias though, since they are elected by the members and there have certainly been female candidates for this position. The medal winners on the other hand…enough said.

Amazingly, the weather/climate sessions contained yet more discussion of the good performance of the ensemble mean. Apparently its good performance (relative to ensemble members) is due to nonlinear filtering? Not really, it’s just Euclidean geometry and simple algebra. Ho hum. See these three posts and the associated paper for more details. Not much point writing it down if people aren’t going to read it though! There was also "decadal" forecasting of the next 2-5 years but to be fair someone had actually done a full 10. It doesn’t work, but at least they tried.

A PICO session on the use of econometric methods in climate science is the sort of thing I really appreciate being able to see at the EGU. Nothing stood out as particularly important but it covered a wide range of methods and applications. I must admit I was a little bit suspicious of someone fitting an inherently unstable time series model to 20 years of ice sheet volume data and concluding as a result that the ice sheets are terribly unstable though His argument was that the unstable model fitted the data better than any simpler version. My counter-argument was that we’ve actually had 10,000 years of stable ice sheets prior to the reduction in recent decades! I think the underlying problem is that the recent accelerated loss is externally forced which his model doesn’t explicitly account for. This is a typical failure of econometric methods in my view, that they do not always take account of background knowledge that is implicit in the fundamental physics of the systems they are attempting to model. All good fun stuff again though. Last thing today was paleo posters (from the morning session) which we are not contributing to this time round. Lots of people to meet and chat to, after not attending last year.

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: EGU 2018 Day 1

Going to try a mini-blog straight away to avoid a big backlog. Arriving late on Sunday to a self-catering apartment meant a quick shop on Monday morning and missed session. As I said to Didier when he complained that I missed his 8:30 session (with a sceptic talk first up), I had something else more important already scheduled – breakfast! There was a brief moment of excitement later on when I asked a hostile question and the speaker accused me of being Jonty Rougier. No, he’s the other one who does that The presentation in question was something that basically reproduced our results from several years ago, only less completely and correctly. Well, that’s my side of the story anyway. I presume Jonty has yet another side. To be honest we agree far more than we disagree but of course it’s the disagreements that make it fun.

Main event of the day – apart from me blagging my way into a free lunch –

TISATAAFL!

– was the GMD 10th anniversary celebrations. A mixed session of short talks and a reception at the end of the day. When we set it up 10 years ago I never really imagined it would be so successful. So that’s really been (and continues to be) a lot of fun. Rolf Sander had a small puzzle that computing experts might like to consider: firstly, what does this Fortran 77 code output, and secondly, why? I answered the first part easily enough, the second was more challenging.

This is the code:

 

which can be found here if you want to download it and try it yourself. I should however warn you that some have found it either does not compile or does not generate the correct result depending on compiler. But I have it on (reasonably) good authority that it is acceptable code that should work (though not necessarily how you would expect…) according to the formal standard.

Here are our merry band of intrepid executive editors. Well, the 4 of them (out of 6) who could attend. One of them is jules and three of them are not. They all have feet really, just imagine 8 open-toed sandals and you won’t be far wrong.

And so to bed. Jules has a 7:30 meeting to look forward to. I have breakfast again