In May 2024, the DTC lost a major contributor and developer. Randy Bullock was a brilliant mathematician and software developer who was instrumental in the creation of tools used by countless DTC visitors and staff, as well as the worldwide community of METplus users. The DTC would like to note our sadness in losing Randy as a colleague and simultaneously celebrate Randy’s contributions, which were extensive.
One of Randy’s most important accomplishments was development of the MODE (Method for Object-based Diagnostic Evaluation) approach for forecast evaluation, a major component of METplus. This was one of the first spatial forecast-verification methods developed to evaluate gridded forecasts. MODE (and some other spatial methods) were designed to prevent the “double penalty” problem when evaluating predictions of spatially coherent phenomena such as precipitation and clouds. The double penalty arises with traditional verification methods, in which a forecast at a grid point can be counted as both a miss and a false alarm if the forecast feature is displaced from the observed feature. Instead of considering direct grid-to-grid comparisons, MODE provides a mechanism for evaluating and comparing physical characteristics (e.g., size, intensity, location) of the forecast and observed phenomena (e.g., of precipitation) and measuring the displacement of the objects and comparisons of their characteristics (e.g., location, intensity, size). MODE-TD (MODE Time Domain), an extension of MODE, evaluates three-dimensional features (e.g., x- and y- locations, across time). MODE was also recently enhanced to define and compare objects using multiple input fields. These innovative capabilities are used to compare spatial features in gridded NWP model data and observations, and have been widely applied, including to other weather phenomena.
Randy’s technical expertise was legendary and essential to DTC activities beyond the world of MODE. He was the local expert who supported different model grids and map projections in the vx_grid library, and he greatly enjoyed working out the math behind grid conversion functions. After retiring, he helped the METplus team begin the transition from home-grown projection code to the more widely used PROJ projection library. Randy's vx_regrid library is an extension of his expertise with grids that enabled MET to automatically regrid data on the fly. From MET's first release in 2007 to his retirement, Randy either wrote that code, mentored other engineers to learn it, or helped the team fix his code when we broke it!
Altogether Randy contributed over 470,000 real lines of code spread over nearly 1,869 files within the MET repository. He authored and supported his own configuration file language (in the vx_config library) that is still used, and was a local expert in data formats, from GRIB1 to GIS shape files, and beyond. He was generous with his knowledge, had incredible patience, and was able to guide colleagues to resolutions for many messy problems. In recent years, he spearheaded Python embedding in MET, enabling the integration of data from Python into MET. Many more of his accomplishments (e.g., development of extensive postscript libraries) also had major impacts on the DTC and well beyond.
Randy Bullock’s software development, generosity, and work will undoubtedly continue to benefit students, researchers, and operations as long as the METplus system continues to exist. He is greatly missed.
