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Post on Akio Arakawa, Yale Mintz & the UCLA GCM — Image Research & Licensing Report

All images downloaded to /home/michal/repos/michalbrennek.github.io/assets/images/.

Image: Arakawa_grids.svg

  • Source URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Discretization_for_the_different_Arakawa_grids_correct.svg
  • Direct file: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Discretization_for_the_different_Arakawa_grids_correct.svg
  • License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
  • Author: Rpnl ocn (Wikimedia Commons user), 2016
  • Credit line (for figcaption): The five Arakawa grids (A, B, C, D, E) as introduced in Arakawa & Lamb (1977). Diagram by Wikimedia Commons user Rpnl ocn, CC BY-SA 4.0.
  • Dimensions: 535 x 343 (nominal SVG viewport; vector scales losslessly)
  • Notes: The canonical schematic used on the Wikipedia “Arakawa grids” article. This is the single most important illustrative image for the post — shows placement of mass (h), u-velocity and v-velocity points on all five grid staggerings. Vector format means it is sharp at any rendered size. CC BY-SA requires attribution and share-alike; safe for blog use with credit in figcaption.

Image: UCLA_campus.jpg

  • Source URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UCLA_Mathematical_Sciences_Building.jpg
  • Direct file: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/UCLA_Mathematical_Sciences_Building.jpg
  • License: Public domain (released by the copyright holder)
  • Author: Oleg Alexandrov, 21 June 2007
  • Credit line (for figcaption): The UCLA Mathematical Sciences Building, where the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (formerly Meteorology) has been housed since 1967 — Arakawa and Mintz’s home institution. Photo by Oleg Alexandrov, 2007, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
  • Dimensions: 2576 x 1932 px
  • Notes: Exact building where Arakawa and Mintz actually worked, not a generic UCLA shot. Strong choice for context. Public-domain release means no attribution is legally required, but crediting the photographer is courteous and standard practice.

Image: Jacob_Bjerknes.jpg

  • Source URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jacob_bjerknes_headshot.jpg
  • Direct file: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Jacob_bjerknes_headshot.jpg
  • License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
  • Author: Hedvig Bjerknes (Bjerknes Family collection, 1968)
  • Credit line (for figcaption): Jacob Bjerknes, founder of the UCLA Department of Meteorology (1940) and Mintz’s doctoral advisor, photographed in 1968. Photo by Hedvig Bjerknes, Bjerknes Family collection, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
  • Dimensions: 1443 x 2073 px
  • Notes: Included because Bjerknes is the connective tissue between this post and earlier norwegian-school material — he brought Mintz into meteorology and is the reason UCLA had an atmospheric-dynamics department at all. Use optionally if the post references Bjerknes; skip if it doesn’t.

Image: NASA_GEOS5_clouds.jpg

  • Source URL: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3657/
  • Direct file: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003600/a003657/sc09cloud_still_persp_c1440.0500.jpg
  • License: Public domain (NASA Scientific Visualization Studio; NASA material is not subject to copyright in the United States). Credit is requested.
  • Author: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio (simulation by GMAO, GEOS-5 nature run)
  • Credit line (for figcaption): Clouds from a GEOS-5 7-km global simulation (August 2009) — a direct descendant of the Mintz-Arakawa UCLA GCM tradition, now resolving individual storm systems. Visualization: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.
  • Dimensions: 4096 x 4096 px
  • Notes: Perspective view of the whole globe with clouds resolved at 7 km — visually shows what a modern GCM produces, a direct lineage from UCLA’s coarse 1963 run (7° x 9°) to today. Serves as a “descendant” figure if one wants to show how far the field travelled. Also used as the source for header-arakawa.jpg.

Image: header-arakawa.jpg

  • Source URL: derived from https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3657/ (same GEOS-5 still as above)
  • Direct file (source): https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003600/a003657/sc09cloud_still_persp_c1440.0500.jpg
  • License: Public domain (NASA SVS). Credit requested.
  • Author: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
  • Credit line (for figcaption, if header caption is used): Header: NASA/Goddard SVS GEOS-5 global cloud simulation.
  • Dimensions: 1600 x 900 px (16:9), processed from the 4096 x 4096 source by centering-crop to 16:9 then resizing to 1600 x 900 with Lanczos resampling (PIL/Pillow 12.1.1)
  • Notes: Dramatic curved-Earth perspective with swirling storm systems — visually atmospheric and computational at once, fits the blog’s aesthetic (similar in feel to header-climate.jpg, header-model-clouds.jpg). Square-to-16:9 crop preserves the planet in the frame.

Images considered and NOT downloaded

Akio Arakawa portrait — NOT AVAILABLE under free license

  • Searched: Wikimedia Commons (no results), UCLA AOS obituary page (WebFetch denied; page is presumably copyrighted UCLA content anyway), AIP Niels Bohr Library (has oral history from 1997 but no freely-licensed portrait indexed), AMS Bulletin (no freely-licensed obituary portrait found).
  • Status: No CC or PD portrait of Arakawa exists on any platform I could verify. The UCLA AOS memorial page (https://atmos.ucla.edu/news/dr-akio-arakawa-distinguished-research-professor-emeritus/) reportedly carries an institutional photo, but UCLA does not publish a blanket reuse license on departmental news pages; using it would require explicit written permission from UCLA AOS communications.
  • Recommendation: Skip the Arakawa portrait, or email UCLA AOS (atmos.ucla.edu/contact) for permission — they have been cooperative about posthumous tributes. Do not fabricate or substitute an AI-generated image.

Yale Mintz portrait — NOT AVAILABLE under free license

  • Searched: Wikimedia Commons (no results), NCAR Archives Yale Mintz Collection (https://aspace.archives.ucar.edu/repositories/2/resources/40 — three films, but “materials have not been reformatted to a digital medium” and no online imagery), UCLA In Memoriam records (text only), Hebrew University archives (no digital portrait indexed).
  • Status: Mintz died in 1991 in Jerusalem; his era predates routine online photographic archiving, and no family-donated image has surfaced on a free platform. Even the 1993 UC In Memoriam entry is text-only on OAC.
  • Recommendation: Proceed without a Mintz portrait and note it in the text. This is the same situation as several other mid-century figures in the series (e.g., Charney-era collaborators).

Arakawa-Schubert cumulus parameterization schematic — NOT DOWNLOADED

  • No CC-licensed schematic of the convective-ensemble / quasi-equilibrium concept found on Wikimedia. Papers that contain the figure (JAS 1974) are behind the AMS paywall/copyright. Recreating it would require an original diagram, out of scope for image research.
  • Recommendation: Skip, or commission an original SVG later.

Phillips 1956 nonlinear instability figure — NOT DOWNLOADED

  • Not re-researched (already covered in earlier image rounds for post 15). If needed, the existing header-phillips.jpg or Frankel_portrait.jpg covers the Phillips-era context.

IBM 7090 / early-computer era — NOT DOWNLOADED

  • The repo already contains NASA_7090.jpg and various 1960s-era machine photos. No new download needed.

Early UCLA GCM output figure — NOT DOWNLOADED

  • NASA Technical Reports Server (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19730012781, “Design of the UCLA general circulation model”) hosts the 1973 Arakawa technical report, which is a federal-government publication and in principle public domain, but the report’s figures are rasterized inside the PDF and the NTRS license statement is ambiguous for contractor-authored content. Would need a deeper dive to extract a clean figure. The repo already has early_GCM.jpg which may serve.
  • Recommendation: If a specific UCLA GCM output figure is needed, extract one page from the NTRS PDF with pdftotext/pymupdf in a follow-up pass and verify the license statement on that particular report first.

Summary

  • 5 images downloaded and verified: Arakawa_grids.svg, UCLA_campus.jpg, Jacob_Bjerknes.jpg, NASA_GEOS5_clouds.jpg, header-arakawa.jpg (derived).
  • 2 planned images (Arakawa portrait, Mintz portrait) could not be obtained under CC/PD terms — both gaps documented above; the post should note “no free portrait available” rather than substitute copyrighted material.
  • All licenses verified at source page before download; all files passed file sanity check (valid SVG / JPEG).