Having worked in a bureaucracy for 20+ years, there have been many times when I would ask someone, why is this done this way? A lot of the time the answer was,  “I don’t know” or “it’s just done this way because it has always been done this way.” Neither answer would set well with […]

I have never played the blame game when things don’t go as expected. When it comes to dispersion modeling and the predicted concentrations are too high to be acceptable, then I do want to know what the causes are so they can be addressed. If you are using AERMOD, you could use the EVENT model […]

Let’s be completely honest with each other. Nobody, and I do mean absolutely nobody, does dispersion modeling for fun. It is not as physically demanding as nailing down roofing singles in the summertime heat, but both, roofing and dispersion modeling, are those things you do only when you have to and do no more than […]

Way back in the good old days of getting your punch card stack ready for processing (yes, I have used computer punch cards) only one model run at a time was the norm. You started it and waited for it to finish; hopefully successfully. Technology has progressed since then, but the norm is still to […]

In one of my graduate classes, a long time ago, the professor giving the lecture was starting to through some derivations of equations. He started out by writing down assumption that were known to be true. He paused for a moment, looking at the list of assumptions, then asked himself, as well as the whole […]

There are many things that have a name but are not what their name indicates. For example, a panda bear is not a bear at all, but a big racoon. A peanut is not a nut. It’s a legume (a bean). A horned toad is a lizard. A volume source fits into the same category. […]