Happy Perihelion 2015!

I was late to with you a happy New Year for 2015, so hope the perihelion (our closest approach to the sun each year, typically January 3rd) passes well for everyone and kicks off a year of good events and health.

Year turnovers are good opportunities to look back at what I did the previous year (some good, some not so good, and not much blogging) and ponder what to do in the coming year (more good, less not so good, and more blogging).  In the blogging side of the coming year, I plan to be more regular in posting.  Part of that will be that I'll be less restrictive about scaring people with math.  I'll at least hide the scarier stuff at the bottom and give fair warning :-)

Two strains of posts will be new this year.  One will be, let's call it "Journal of Spectral Climatology".  Obviously not a peer-reviewed journal, but I'll be taking a whack at looking at climate not so much in terms of 'today's expected high temperature is ...' as 'in this part of the world, you expect summer to be this much warmer than winter'.  Or ditto for day versus night.  And then ... we'll see. For data source, I'm going to pound on the NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis.  (that's where to get the data, for description of the sources, see Saha, Suranjana, and Coauthors, 2010: The NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 91, 1015.1057. doi: 10.1175/2010BAMS3001.1)

The second, call it "Journal of Hypothetical Climatology".  Two sides to this.  One is, I at least used to read a lot of science fiction, and there are many candidate places to ponder what climate would be like.  Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement is one I particularly like.  Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clark is another good candidate.  The other side is, getting an exact solution for the real earth's climate is impossible.  But there may be some hypothetical earths for which we can get exact answers.