Profiles of Blog Readers-1

I am always amazed at who is reading my blog. Today at work I was visited by Juhani Rinne to welcome me to Finland and talk about my experiences so far in this foreign country. Although not working anymore for FMI, he wrote the first numerical weather forecasting model in Finland, a barotropic model. He taught classes at the Department of Meteorology (now defunct) at the University of Helsinki and worked for the weather service here. It's always nice to meet someone who can provide historical context for the way things evolved at FMI. He told me that the concept that FMI would have the money to hire an American professor in the old days was unheard of. So, times have changed. And, hopefully, for the better in this regard!

A search of the American Meteorological Society journals shows that he published 10 papers in Monthly Weather Review from 1982's "Empirical Orthogonal Functions of the 500 mb Height Weighted with Respect to the Analysis Error" to 1993's "Estimation of the Cressman Term for a Barotropic Model through Optimization with Use of the Adjoint Model." It seems he was using techniques well ahead of the time they became popular.