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59 Example Questions

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up vote 14 down vote

added by Joe Dec 23 '11 at 16:36

That's pretty well covered by gis.stackexchange.com – underdark Apr 10 at 6:15

@underdark : GIS will allow questions about FITS and CDF? – Joe Apr 10 at 21:25

@Joe: Personally, I only know NetCDF and that it's supported in GIS. In my opinion those questions would be allowed and welcome on GIS. – underdark Apr 11 at 6:04

@underdark, comments like that are much more useful when the commenter provides a link or two as illustrations :-) (I'm not saying you are wrong, but a few exemplars would be most excellent!) – nodnarb Apr 19 at 1:15

Regardless of whether these particular file formats are used in GIS, there are certainly geoscience file formats which have no relevance to GIS applications. ZVI (Zeiss microscope image), for instance, or CIT (CalTech magnetometer format). – Pont May 5 at 7:26

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up vote 11 down vote

added by winwaed Jan 6 '12 at 14:33

This would fit well in the Climate Change proposal. Fits well here too though. Good argument for merging. – naught101 Feb 7 '12 at 5:36

up vote 11 down vote

added by jurassic Feb 3 '12 at 18:51

pretty much as soon as the crust formed. – Sean Dec 27 '12 at 23:43

up vote 11 down vote

added by naught101 Aug 24 '12 at 1:17

up vote 10 down vote

added by Richard Nov 9 '11 at 19:03

up vote 10 down vote

added by Richard Nov 10 '11 at 18:16

Could also fit in the Meteorology proposal, or perhaps in the Climate Change proposal – naught101 Feb 7 '12 at 5:34

up vote 10 down vote

added by winwaed Dec 10 '11 at 0:47

up vote 10 down vote

added by Joe Dec 23 '11 at 16:34

	duplicate of "I am looking for a dataset on <Topic X>" – underdark Apr 11 at 16:26
	@underdark : interesting definition of 'duplicate' when that was asked 10 months after this one. – Joe Apr 11 at 16:46

up vote 10 down vote

added by InquilineKea Jan 22 '12 at 2:02

up vote 10 down vote

added by winwaed Jan 26 '12 at 13:51

up vote 10 down vote

added by jurassic Feb 3 '12 at 18:20

up vote 10 down vote

added by jurassic Feb 3 '12 at 18:32

"basic granites" - haha! Bad Geology Puns rule :-) – winwaed Feb 27 '12 at 15:54

up vote 10 down vote

added by jurassic Feb 3 '12 at 18:38

up vote 10 down vote

added by Leo Uieda May 25 '12 at 17:15

I'd call this a "narrow but wide" question; narrow, because it refers to seismic data processing, but wide because it doesn't specify reflection/refraction/passive, land/marine/transition, 2D/3D, academic/commercial, volumes of data to be processed etc etc. As a result it will be hard to answer without additional questions and/or have no "definitive" correct answer. – GuyM Dec 7 '12 at 19:01

Consider "What is a good open source package to process 2D reflection land data collected on a 48-channel system for accademic research? We may need to include our own algorithms as part of the research we are doing. It needs to be able to run on our Windows laptop in the field?" – GuyM Dec 7 '12 at 19:03

I agree that is was too broad. I changed it to be a bit more specific but not too much since these are only example questions. Is that appropriate? – Leo Uieda Dec 10 '12 at 16:19

As I understand it, these questions are supposed to be samples of something you might find on the site once it becomes active, rather than descriptions of a category of question. Highly specific questions should therefore be fine. I don't think there's much harm in slightly broadening it as your current formulation does, though. – Pont Apr 23 at 12:13

up vote 10 down vote

added by naught101 Aug 24 '12 at 1:09

up vote 10 down vote

added by naught101 Aug 24 '12 at 1:20

	Even more confusing: the weather report that I read often says something like "30% chance of rain. >10mm", then the next day "70% chance of rain <1mm". WTF? – naught101 Oct 2 '12 at 2:05
	I heard once that the National Weather Service rarely puts the chance at 50% -- they prefer 40% or 60% as it seems less like a flip of the coin. I've never tried looking at the data to see if it's true or not, though. – Joe Oct 20 '12 at 2:52

up vote 10 down vote

added by naught101 Aug 24 '12 at 1:22

up vote 10 down vote

added by naught101 Aug 24 '12 at 1:23

Copied from the climate change proposal. – naught101 Aug 24 '12 at 1:23

This is Not Constructive by definition, since there does not exist (and probably never will exist) a good and widely acceptable answer. This certainly asks for debates and flame wars. – tohecz May 9 at 8:40

To some extent, any question on anthropogenic climate change risks flame wars. That's unfortunate, but we shouldn't avoid all discussion of it for that reason. Many papers have been published addressing this question. Perhaps they're not "widely acceptable", particularly to some people outside the geoscience community, but they provide pertinent and constructive answers to the question. – Pont May 9 at 10:49

Just because many people have opinions on something, we should not ignore the huge amount of quantitative research done on that topic! I think that for "trusted" sources, we should restrict ourselves to papers published in peer-reviewed journals (or summaries which specifically reference such papers); not that this guarantees they are the absolute and eternal truth, but it at least indicates a minimum standard of reasoned argument. I think that within the scientific literature -- at least within papers which stood up to subsequent criticism -- we'd find a far narrower range than 0-100%. – Pont May 10 at 9:57

Also, even if the answer really were "there is absolutely no consensus and studies show attributions ranging from 0% to 100%", we should cite the relevant sources and leave that as the answer. A question should not be deemed invalid just because the answer is currently not known with full certainty. – Pont May 10 at 10:06

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up vote 10 down vote

added by malonso Aug 24 '12 at 13:13

This is likely too broad to be answerable; most modern forecasting involves running multiple simulations w/ varying input (to represent measurement uncertainty), and then use the stack of results to get an estimate of likelihood of an event. – Joe Sep 25 '12 at 15:13

No, I think this is an excellent question. There are simple, widely known biases that most models share. One that I'm aware of is that most models have too many "drizzle days" - that is, days with low-volume, constant precipitation. Total precipitation is generally good, but the distribution is not quite right. – naught101 Oct 2 '12 at 2:03

up vote 10 down vote

added by Mchaiiann Aug 31 '12 at 6:27

up vote 10 down vote

added by david valentine Oct 11 '12 at 23:43

Answers may not always be found or even asked in this community. For example, in GIS.stackexchange.com, "Looking for Mid-Holocene (~6000 BP) bioclim dataset" gis.stackexchange.com/questions/21195/… Ideally these types of questions will be asked here. – david valentine Oct 11 '12 at 23:45

(gis.stackexchange.com/questions/11507/…) Global solar radiation data – david valentine Oct 11 '12 at 23:48

Historical Hurricane Tracks gis.stackexchange.com/questions/34400/… – david valentine Oct 11 '12 at 23:51

Where can I find spatial data on Runoff Data and peak discharge data of asia region gis.stackexchange.com/questions/34035/… – david valentine Oct 11 '12 at 23:52

up vote 10 down vote

added by JustinY Oct 29 '12 at 20:07

up vote 10 down vote

added by a different ben Dec 19 '12 at 4:00

up vote 9 down vote

added by gerrit Oct 16 '12 at 21:53

up vote 7 down vote

added by FossilizedCarlos Dec 11 '12 at 9:34

"super position" should, presumably, be "superposition". – Pont Apr 23 at 12:03

Corrected. Thanks! – FossilizedCarlos Apr 23 at 23:55

up vote 6 down vote

added by Ries Jan 14 at 18:24

up vote 6 down vote

added by furins Jan 28 at 23:12

up vote 3 down vote

added by Richard Nov 10 '11 at 18:19

Define "dangerous"? Perhaps being too close to an active volcano is actually what's dangerous? This isn't worded very well for a scientific SE – naught101 Feb 7 '12 at 5:33

I agree that it's vaguely worded but I think it's a promising question. Suggested more-specific version: "Why do pyroclastic flows pose a greater hazard to human life than many other eruption-related phenomena, such as lava flows and bombs?". A volcanologist / hazards person (which I am not) could probably do a better job of rewording this. – Pont Apr 16 at 10:11

up vote 2 down vote

added by Jezibelle Oct 27 '12 at 18:50

up vote 2 down vote

added by InquilineKea Dec 3 '12 at 23:17

up vote 2 down vote

added by InquilineKea Dec 3 '12 at 23:20

up vote 2 down vote

added by FossilizedCarlos Dec 11 '12 at 9:32

up vote 2 down vote

added by FossilizedCarlos Dec 11 '12 at 9:33

up vote 2 down vote

added by FossilizedCarlos Dec 11 '12 at 9:33

Holy shit ... hey, fellow geophysicists, this is rather provocative, is not it ;-) ? ualberta.ca/~unsworth/geophysicist_defn.pdf – ernestopheles Dec 12 '12 at 17:21

up vote 2 down vote

added by gerrit Jan 15 at 22:36

Oooh, practical science questions. Nice! – naught101 Apr 2 at 4:34

up vote 2 down vote

added by Reliable Source Jan 18 at 15:33

up vote 2 down vote

added by Paul A. Clayton Feb 11 at 14:27

It might be good to try to figure out where the boundary is between this proposal and Biology.SE. More questions like this would help! – naught101 Apr 2 at 4:35