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Draft Corrections — Post 48: The Hemisphere That Caught Up

Post path: _posts/2026-07-20-The-hemisphere-that-caught-up.md Status: verification complete (2026-07-20); both corrections below APPLIED to the post prior to publication. Companion: VERIFIED_FACTS_Post48_SatelliteRadiance.md (canonical fact table).

Method

Independent citation-and-quote verification pass following the series protocol (VERIFICATION_SUMMARY_2026-05-17.md):

  1. Citation resolution. All 46 unique primary (non-archive) URLs in the post’s footnotes were fetched (HTTP, follow-redirects, browser UA). Result: 44 returned HTTP 200; one returned a genuine 404 (dead link, corrected below); one returned a Wiley 403 that was confirmed valid via the doi.org resolver (bot-blocking, not a dead link). The generic web.archive.org/web/<url> archive form was spot-checked and resolves (HTTP 200).
  2. Quote fidelity. Every verbatim block/inline quote in the post was checked against the source PDF (downloaded + pdftotext + whitespace-flattened grep):
    • Simmons & Hollingsworth 2002 abstract (“about a one-day gain… last three years in the southern hemisphere”) — verbatim match (ECMWF TM342).
    • Simmons & Hollingsworth 2002 payoff line (“reduced so much in the southern hemisphere… almost as skilful as those for the northern hemisphere”) — verbatim match (TM342).
    • Eyre 2007 (“sounding quality in cloudy areas that had only been available hitherto in cloud-free areas”; “crucial to the performance of NWP systems”) — verbatim match.
    • ECMWF “Fifty years of data assimilation” (“the transition to variational assimilation and direct radiance assimilation resulted in the largest changes to operational forecast scores at the end of the 1990s”) — verbatim match.
    • TM711 (“catastrophic degradation in the southern hemisphere, and very significant degradation in the northern hemisphere”) — verbatim match.
    • Cardinali 2013 FSOI ranking — one discrepancy found and corrected (see Tier 2 below).
  3. Facts. Load-bearing dates, channel counts, launch dates, and attributions were confirmed in the workflow verifier pass and recorded in the VERIFIED_FACTS table; no Tier-1 factual error was found in this pass.

Corrections applied

1. (Tier 2 — quote fidelity) Cardinali 2013 FSOI ranking quote

Location: Section 10 (“The proof: which eye matters most”), block quote; footnote [^cardinali2013].

Issue: The post rendered the block quote as “…IASI, AIRS, AIREP (aircraft) and GPS-RO observations account for 10%…”. The source (Cardinali 2013 ECMWF lecture notes, 16937-observation-impact-short-range-forecast.pdf, p. lines 397–399) actually reads “…IASI, AIRS, AIREP (aircraft data and GPS-RO observations account for 10%…” — i.e. the source contains the word “data” and an unclosed parenthesis (a typo in the original). The post had dropped “data” and re-scoped the parenthesis, so the passage was not verbatim as presented. The workflow verifier had propagated the same altered wording into VERIFIED_FACTS while labelling it “read verbatim”; this independent pass against the PDF surfaced it.

Fix applied: changed “AIREP (aircraft)” → “AIREP (aircraft data)” in both the post and the VERIFIED_FACTS table, restoring the source’s word “data” and closing the parenthesis editorially (the source’s open paren is an obvious typo). Tilde/percent spacing (“(~25%)” for the source’s “(∼ 25 %)”) is left as an accepted ASCII normalisation consistent with house style.

2. (Citation — dead link) AIRS JPL mission URL returned 404

Location: Footnote [^airs].

Issue: the secondary primary URL https://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/overview/ returns HTTP 404 (the JPL AIRS site was restructured). The footnote’s other primary (Wikipedia AIRS) resolves 200.

Fix applied: replaced the dead URL with the current JPL AIRS mission page https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/atmospheric-infrared-sounder-airs/ (HTTP 200).

Not changed (verified acceptable)

  • [^andersson1994] primary …/qj.49712051707 returns 403 on direct fetch (Wiley bot-blocking); the DOI resolves 200 via doi.org and is confirmed correct. Left as-is with its Wayback fallback.
  • Wayback archive links use the generic web.archive.org/web/<url> form (no timestamp); this resolves (HTTP 200) and is the series’ accepted “permanence layer, not a gate” convention. Per VERIFICATION_SUMMARY_2026-05-17.md, harness-level Wayback save POSTs are intermittently blocked; timestamped snapshots may be added later via the web form if desired.
  • All COULD-NOT-VERIFY rows in the VERIFIED_FACTS table were correctly OMITTED by the writer (no McMillin birth/death year; split-window hedged to “mid-1970s”; no unverified SH-without-satellites web figure; no specific present-day day-N convergence value).

Verdict

No Tier-1 factual errors. Two corrections (one quote-fidelity, one dead link), both applied. Post is citation-clean and quote-faithful for publication.