all Brian F. Farrell stories

Biologists remember landmark theory

404132862 — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:12:41 -0400

Forty years ago, Edward O. Wilson and Robert H. MacArthur described how size and isolation determine how many species an island can support. Last week, biologists gathered to mark the theory’s anniversary, calling it a “pivotal point” in ecology’s relatively short history.

Professor Lord Robert May of Oxford University said the word “ecology” — which describes the interaction between an organism and its environment — was coined just a little more than a century ago. By the 1960s, he said, the science of ecology was still mainly a descriptive one, lacking theories to tie together the observations by scientists in the field.

Weather watchers forecast better forecasts

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:23:37 -0400

Brian Farrell, the Robert P. Burden Professor of Meteorology, is spearheading a project that is part of a five-year initiative funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research to spark progress in the general area of predictability of the atmosphere and oceans. "Right now we have a fairly good forecast out to 48 hours," Farrell says, "maybe two or three days. After that, you never know." The reason for this, he adds, is that starting out with a certain amount of error is inevitable. Both the observational data and the mathematical model used to parse it are imperfect; the necessity of using them together only compounds the problem.