This lovely picture from stevewall shows that rain is not only necessary, but can also be beautiful. When looking at meteorological data, it’s hard to find anything beautiful in the usual definition of the word. But it can be both fun and interesting. In this post, I’ll look at the average monthly precipitation at a few locations in the United States. They are vastly different depending on where you are, and it’s a fun exercise to figure out why the distributions are the way they are.

I’m not a true weather weenie, but I’ll offer some comments on the yearly cycle. Hopefully I won’t say anything that’s terribly wrong. The data is from the USHCN data available on the NOAA website. The thick black line is the mean monthly values, and the light grey area surrounding the line represents the 1 standard deviation errors. I could have used this page, but then I wouldn’t have been able to include the “error bars”.
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This is another post on a meme that just won’t die. That would mean it’s about finding a linear fit of a short, noisy time series, right? That’s what started it. Further blogging revealed that ignoring the temperature data from GISS and NCDC, which coincidentally both show warming, probably isn’t a good idea. But nope, that’s not what really got me.

That’s going to be a yearly thing for a while. Last year it was cool to be finding 10 year trends. Now it’s going to be 11 for a bit. And next year it will be 12. For 10 year trends, the excuse was that it was a nice round number. I’d like to hear the excuse for this year. Perhaps, “I needed to include the large El Nino in 97/98 in order to get a negative trend”. Although, “11 is a round number since I count in base 11″ would sound a little better.
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This post evaluates 5 of the carbon footprint calculators that are listed on this site by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They have many of them, but I chose 5 to review based on a few factors. The first was that it had to be for the United States, and specifically Arizona. There are some available for worldwide audiences. Secondly, because I could not review all of them in a timely fashion, I quickly browsed through them, which offered a quick judgment. If they didn’t seem on first glance to be in the top 5, they were not evaluated in detail. Lastly, if there was any barrier to use, such as registration or payment, it was not reviewed.

On to the reviews!
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The rules are simple:
Anytime anyone says “Al Gore”, have shot of your favorite beverage.

My first drink today comes courtesy of Ross McKitrick. Many thanks.