2023-09-15

We've spent the last few months in the mountains of the western part of the state. Cool, misty mornings and sunny afternoons perfect for swimming in the many lakes and streams. My trail shoes got some solid miles; on my last run before we came home I saw three bears, a mother and two cubs rolling and playing and scratching trees. I don't think they saw me as I observed for a while before doubling back to not disturb them.

We also did a first excursion up the green river, walking in and through the riverbed itself, shifting bank to bank to avoid the strongest currents and most harrowing rapids. I'd like next time to travel the full distance upstream to see where the river takes us.

Two things I would recommend not mixing: a newborn entering your family and a complicated and prolonged corporate restructuring/financing. Thankfully, one of these things makes my heart sing. The other has been a metaphorical storm cloud; I've done a lot of journaling about it but nothing I can share yet.

I can't stop thinking about weather forecasts. A few things in particular:

1. Numerical weather predictions (NWPs) are incredibly hard to access, both due to the most common file format and their dimensionality
2. These hard to access predictions are surprisingly inaccurate (you'd think we - humans - would be better at this by now, but it's very hard)
3. The forecasting models are extremely brittle to an input being unavailable
4. NWPs, when presented, don't do a good job communicating confidence intervals

In talking to my longtime collaborator, there's the seed of an idea how how to address all of these issues. We have more thinking to do, but the benefits of an improved weather forecast are far-reaching and energizing.