if you could blow up the world

oh fhcalc, the bane of my existence...i am referring, of course, the the utility subroutine in ECOMSED (which is hydroqual's 3-d hydrodynamic/sediment transport modeling code) that calculates fetch lengths for use in its various wind-wave submodels. when we first started working with their old code, we couldn't even get it to compile because of errors in fhcalc, mostly having to do with boundary cells. after porting the model to their newer, public-domain cose there were fewer difficulties although we still had to put a couple of hard-wires in there.

but we were still bedeviled by spiky results in the cohesive sediment concentrations, which would only occur when the wind-wave model was used (and only smb, not the donegal model, which would always blow up anyway). the wave model itself looked okay, so we were somewhat at a loss, until i finally checked the fetch length calculations and discovered that, for certain cells in certain directions, fhcalc had calculated fetches of multiple hundreds of kilometers. we are not modeling lake superior, however. this was clearly the culprit, and while i figured out how to correct it by hand using data dumped into excel (the problem has to do with calculating final locations using phantom cell corners), my first attempt at changing the code was unsuccessful. unfortunately (and this is our little secret) i couldn't stay late to fix it. but today! i will master fhcalc or die trying.

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on other mornings i might have complained about the moderate, slanting headwind on the ride in, but i know that today it will bring warm air with it. and i am happy about that. the variation of weather this time of year is a constant wonder. i can of course remember very clearly what it was like 16 years today (because the older son was born that very day) and it was very cold, colder than the day before, and i remember also the bits of ice on the windshield and even the stray snowflakes, there on the volkswagen, very much later that night when i went out to the car and drove home for a few hours while they slept, what i thought were my very last hours of not being a dad, only really those hours were already gone, because i already was. a dad.