(Small edit made 21 Apr to add a corollary at the bottom of the post.) I’ve said bits of this in various places and at various times to various people, but I don’t think I have written it down in a complete and coherent form. Actually, bits and pieces of the story have come to…
New manuscript! Now up on github too. Title as post. Yes, this is us dipping our toes into epidemiology. Turns out that calibrating a simple model with observational data is much the same whether it’s paleoclimate or epidemics. The maths and the methods are much the same. In fact this one is a particularly easy one…
A week ago, I blogged the graph on the left. Last night, one of the epidemiological modelling teams advising the Govt published the graph on the right. Billed as “new research”, it has formed the basis of the new Govt guidelines on social distancing to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Apart from the choice of colours,…
Here are a few numbers that I’ve been bouncing around my head. The govt’s strategy is clear: they want the disease to spread widely, in order that we as a population may achieve “Herd Imunity”. A simple relationship that has some importance to this blogpost: if the basic reproductive rate is R0, then herd immunity…
I was so excited by learning how to embed R code in my blogpost on Monday that I didn’t explain the motivation behind my post very well 🙂 Recently a lot of “flatten the curve” graphics have been doing the rounds recently on Twitter. This is a typical example which is presented and explained in…
This is mostly an excuse to publish a blogpost using Rmarkdown. This is a system for combining R code in a “markdown” text document which can be readily compiled into html or pdf etc and also automatically published on WordPress which hosts the Blueskiesresearch blog. One slight problem I’ve not been able to solve is…
A while ago Mark (leader of the top secret project we are involved in) suggested that it had been a while since we visited the Met Office in Exeter where he works (blog tells me it was exactly 5 years ago, shortly after we had returned to the UK and before Blue Skies Research was really…
Another new manuscript of ours out for review, this time on ESDD. The topic is as the title suggests. This work grew out of our trips to Hamburg and later Stockholm though it wasn’t really the original purpose of our collaboration. However, we were already working with a simple climate model and the 20th century temperature…
Way back in the mists of time, we did a little bit of work on “emergent constraints”. This is a slightly hackneyed term referring to the use of a correlation across an ensemble of models between something we can’t measure but want to estimate (like the equilibrium climate sensitivity S) and something that we can…
Science has been done and papers written! Deadlines have been met! And not by the Govt’s imaginative strategy of declaring that the deadlines no longer exist, as they are doing with NHS waiting times. Though that did seem like an appealing strategy at some points. I will blog about some of it over the next…
