[thegrossman]

Exactly. Those enormous Bagel Blobs tend to occur after the sun goes down (and only in the warmer months. Two months ago, they weren't there).

The image was generated around 10:30 PM EST, so they hadn't had time to propagate further west.

Regarding neural nets, I have to admit that I didn't have much experience with them either before working on Dark Sky. They do, however, seem to be a little more forgiving than other kinds of classifiers (Support Vector Machines, and the like).

Check out the examples for the FANN C library: http://leenissen.dk/fann/wp/

Or in ruby: https://github.com/tangledpath/ruby-fann

[josephhardin]

You might find http://www.chill.colostate.edu/w/Non-precipitation_echoes:_i... to be interesting. It shows some of the dual-pol stuff on insects.