Where do great ideas come from?
Have you ever had a lightbulb moment? A great idea develops in your head, when you clearly see how to tackle a problem or invent a new product or service. Perhaps you’ve stumbled on a solution from an unusual angle or seen the link between two apparently unrelated ideas. Or was the brainwave born out of exasperation with an unsatisfactory experience?
For some, a hunch nags like an itch until they’ve found a game-changing solution. That’s the case with Ray Schmitt, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Seven months after the Mississippi and Missouri river floods of 1993, Ray was intrigued by the abnormally low salinity in the Gulf of Mexico and Gulf Stream. It set him wondering about the connection between the two.
Weather forecasts are generally accurate for two to 10 days. Longer-term predictions are commonly based on the El Nino phenomenon, a warming of the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean but they’re somewhat hit and miss.
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“I wondered if variations in ocean salinity could be used to forecast rainfall on land more accurately,” says Ray. “A large area of ocean has to lose fresh water to evaporation to supply the floods on land. That evaporation would have to make the ocean surface saltier than usual.”
For years Ray worked on his hunch, and co-authored studies with colleagues, accurately predicting seasonal rainfall in regions ranging from the African Sahel to the U.S. Midwest. However, there was little funding available, and few other scientists were prepared to give it the time of day.
That all changed when a colleague passed on details of a government-sponsored competition aimed at providing the most accurate rainfall predictions over a whole year for the U.S. West. For every two weeks, contestants would have to predict the total rainfall amount in all the regions of the West for weeks three to six in the future.
All things are possible until they are proved impossible... P.S.Buck. Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible. Einstein
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