Glen Profile picture
Australian snow and snow weather, hydrology, climate ... other stuff. I reciprocal follow, and reciprocal block. Abusive tweeters get an immediate block.
Jun 19 14 tweets 4 min read
Mr Dutton has chosen Callide in Central Queensland as one of his putative 'locations' to build Federal Government nuclear power stations. Since I personally designed a number of the surface facilities on this site, thought you might be interested in a run-through. Image It's a congested, hilltop site. There are three power stations, two of which still operate, sometimes -- Callide B and Callide C. Despite being separately owned, the generators for those two are actually co-located in the same extended shed.

Here: google.com.au/maps/@-24.3407…
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Jun 3 11 tweets 4 min read
Why is it so? To get far there you'd first have to admit that the misfit is real, and the modelling community is still clutching it's 'uncertainty band' pearls, and denying the appropriateness of non-linear observational models. It's correct that the IPCC 'middle projections' carry substantial uncertainty, but those are the numbers, right there in the great big report (Table SPM.1, below). It's odd that no one much bothers to refer to them. Image
Dec 9, 2023 23 tweets 7 min read
What is this about? Don't know? Maybe you should.

Data from: ceres-tool.larc.nasa.gov/ord-tool/jsp/E…
Image What about this, for the whole planet? Properly interpreting and understanding this dataset is tricky.

This is actually seasonally adjusted (not anomaly from an adopted climatology, which is what is labelled 'deseasonalised' on the CERES site): Image
Oct 5, 2023 11 tweets 5 min read
Don't reckon South Lhonak Lake is a global heating feature? Can't have looked, can you. Around the world, most valley glacier terminal lakes like this have appeared in the last ~half-century of heating (since ~1970), as the glaciers retreated. Here's the largest such glacier in our region -- Tasman Glacier in NZ:
Sep 17, 2023 8 tweets 2 min read
Here's one of only 2 commercial 'small modular reactors' (#SMR's) in the world, both not yet operating. (The other is in Russia.) What do you see? 1. It's not particularly small. At 200 MWe, this is about one-fifth the size of the last conventional reactor commissioned in the world -- Vogtle 3 in the US, in July (1100 MWe). That was 7 years late and ~ x5 over budget. Image
Aug 19, 2023 28 tweets 8 min read
This is quite an interesting read. Have to admit to never looking much at #SMR's (why would you; it's a deliberate distraction, probably run by the same fossil-industry misinformation team). But, as may know, cannot resist things technical, especially in a field I've worked in... ...Power engineering -- coal-fired, not nuclear -- though have had some long-term interest there too. The link is to a 2019 design parameters summary for one proposed design, Rolls-Royce's 'UK SMR', which may or may not be typical of the 'class': aris.iaea.org/PDF/UK-SMR_202…
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May 14, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
TC Mocha just coming up on the ?Agartala radar:
windy.com/-Weather-radar… Image Doppler (this is hours earlier): mausam.imd.gov.in/imd_latest/con… Image
May 13, 2023 9 tweets 3 min read
We really shouldn't have missed this; it's important:
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/20… High hazard dams -- those that will kill a whole lot of people if they fail -- generally have spillways designed to pass the 'probable maximum flood', a hydrological estimate based on a meteorological construct called 'probable maximum precipitation'. Image
May 13, 2023 6 tweets 1 min read
"...a large woman ran out, and throwing the child on her back, disappeared. I now called to the man to stop, when, to our astonishment, he answered in good English, 'What do you want? Do you wish to kill me?' and then followed the woman." The weirdest bit in Pamphlett's account. That has been written out of history, because even the scribe (Uniacke) didn't believe it. Steele has (p59): "It is almost certain (he) did not speak English. The manuscript has, in parentheses ... probably Uniacke’s comment, 'Pamphlet was suffering from a degree of delirium'."
May 11, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
Important Lake Pedder context -- storage v height: Image Despite the two appearing on the surface to be of similar size, the Pedder impoundment is a much smaller volume storage than Lake Gordon, and only has a tiny active storage volume (accessible to the hydropower plant). Image
Apr 23, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Ageist? Fact is people do lose cognition with age, some gradually, some less so. If think otherwise, must not have worked with once-highly-capable, ageing, technical practitioners. Two I'm thinking of made extremely messy errors, one I had to clean up, another a close colleague. 'They would have taken his house' -- meaning the insurance company ('subrogation' ... reasons). He'd done the only thing possible, but wasn't about to risk it a second time.
Apr 22, 2023 10 tweets 3 min read
Apr 22, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
I wonder why so many rocket engine failures? The Russian (USSR) N1 also used many small rocket engines (30 x NK-15s, an excellent engine), and flew to a similar altitude on its most successful (fourth) flight. Rocket engineering is hard. Oops.
Apr 21, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
I cannot comprehend how a reef scientist can do a whole interview on their work without once mentioning that the reefs they're studying are being rapily killed by global heating; will likely all be dead inside 30 years. And the interviewer (Doogue!) doesn't ask, either. In my opinion that's highly unethical. Why do it? Because the university PR department forbids the topic? Even more unethical.
Mar 22, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
The Sunday morning Sentinel-2 satellite image confirms that the main diversion weir on the Baaka-Darling River at Menindee (the 'Main Weir') was closed at the time of the fish kill, as it appears to be in this recent photo: Here; note the distinct water colour difference, upstream (top) vs downstream -- false colour infrared Sentinel-2 satellite image, 19 March 2023: apps.sentinel-hub.com/eo-browser/?zo…
Mar 22, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
Baaka-Darling River at Menindee, Sunday morning -- floating dead fish. This is a false colour infrared Sentinel-2 satellite image: apps.sentinel-hub.com/eo-browser/?zo… Animated, 14 March, before the fish kill, vs 19 March, Sentinel-2 natural colour imagery:
Mar 22, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
All tropical coral reefs are pretty much dead by +2°C. Yes all of them, everywhere, including your Great Barrier Reef. On trend, that's around 2047 ... 24 years from now. How long did Plibersek just approve that Santos coal seam gas mine for, again? Oh yeah, that'd be for 54 years.
Mar 22, 2023 8 tweets 2 min read
Quiet reminder, again, that on the best instrumental estimate (Berkeley Earth, reasons), we will pass +1.5°C later this decade. The trend is strong and it's way too late; there is *no way* to avoid this now. Even the IPCC's own central model estimates, published last year in AR6 WGI, have us passing +1.5°C on or before 2030. It's frankly odd that people are still clutching the +1.5°C straw, including many climate scientists.
Mar 21, 2023 14 tweets 3 min read
The NSW upper house electoral system is combined multi-member proportional by single transferable vote, with optional short-form above-the-line preferential voting by group -- a version of Hare-Clark. If you don't know how that works by now you damn well should. That's generally considered one of the fairest ways to elect multiple members in a single pass, though the NSW implementation is very old-fashioned, for example it still uses sampling to decide the excess vote transfer value. Read Antony: antonygreen.com.au/inclusive-greg…
Mar 21, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
Fascinating. So, it's because we are wimps. Got it. Now if the subject of the 'illegal' recording were ... don't bother, we know. "...Local Nationals MP David Layzell, who features on the tape," @TheRealPBarry. Isn't that the first time he's been identified as such? I assume @ABCmediawatch will have carefully legalled this.
Mar 21, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Could we maybe call it *heating*. 'Warming' is a Watson weasel word™.