Retired

As you may have noticed, there hasn’t been a lot of science getting done here recently. The basic reason for this is that we’ve decided to retire and close down Blue Skies Research Ltd. We set it up about 10 years ago, when we returned from Japan, and have had a lot of fun continuing…

EGU 2022 – how cold was the LGM (again)?

I haven’t blogged in ages but have actually done a bit of work. Specifically, I eventually wrote up my new reconstruction of the Last Glacial Maximum. We did this back in 2012/3 (see here) but since then there have been lots more model simulations, and then in 2020 Jessica Tierney published a new compilation and…

Science breakthrough of the year (runner-up)

Being only a small and insignificant organisation, we would like to take this rare opportunity to blow our own trumpets. Blue Skies Research contributed to one of the runners-up in Science Magazine’s “Breakthrough of the year” review! Specifically, the estimation of climate sensitivity that I previously blogged about here. Obviously, were it not for the…

Modelling the ONS COVID data part 2

Continuing from previously…I have done some upgrades to the method and now have some results that I think are quite acceptable. Most importantly, after thinking about (and getting half-way to implementing) appropriate covariance matrices for the overlapping fortnightly observational summaries, I decided that the most sensible thing to do was just to use a single…

Modelling the ONS COVID data

I’ve grumbled for a while about the ONS analyses of their infection survey pilot (pilot? isn’t it a full-blown survey yet?) without doing anything about it. The purpose of this blog is to outline the issue, get me started on fixing it (or at least presenting my own approach to an analysis) and commit me…

Like a phoenix…

So, the fortnightly chunks in the last post were doing ok, but it’s still a bit clunky. I quickly found that the MCMC method I was using couldn’t really cope with shorter intervals (meaning more R values to estimate). So, after a bit of humming and hawing, I dusted off the iterative Ensemble Kalman Filter…

The EGU review

Well.. that was a very different EGU! We were supposed to be in Vienna, but that was all cancelled a while back of course. I might have felt sorry for my AirBnB host but despite Austria banning everything they didn’t reply to my communication and refused a refund so when AirBnB eventually (after a lot…

Why can’t the Germans be more like us?

And now for the previous post, in reverse. Germany locked down at about the same time as the UK. Actually probably a couple of days earlier, according to Wikipedia and Flaxman et al. Picking a single date is a bit subjective really, but for the purposes of this post I’ll choose the 21st March. So…