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Post on Mark Cane, Stephen Zebiak & the 1985 Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean Model — Image Research & Licensing Report

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

Previously committed (DO NOT re-download), reusable for this post:

  • Gilbert_Walker.jpg — Walker’s 1925 portrait, useful if Walker is referenced.
  • Walker_circulation.png — schematic of the Walker circulation.
  • El_Nino_SST.png — NOAA February 2015 SST anomaly, the diagnostic ENSO warm tongue.
  • ENSO_schematic.svg — normal vs. El Niño tilted-thermocline diagram.
  • Peruvian_fishery.jpg — Chimbote fishing fleet, the human stakes of forecasting.
  • TAO_mooring.jpg — NOAA ATLAS buoy on Ka’imimoana, the observational backbone of operational ENSO forecasting.
  • header-enso.jpg — November 2015 SST anomaly, useful if a different header style is wanted.
  • Jacob_Bjerknes.jpg (Arakawa post) — Bjerknes 1968, the theoretical predecessor.

Image: Mark_Cane.jpg

  • Source page: https://lamont.columbia.edu/directory/mark-cane
  • Direct file: https://lamont.columbia.edu/sites/lamont.columbia.edu/files/styles/cu_crop/public/cu_ldeo_profile_import/112/MarkCane.JPG
  • License: NOT freely licensed. Image is the standard Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory directory portrait of Prof. Mark Cane and falls under Columbia University’s default copyright (“all rights reserved”, https://www.columbia.edu/content/copyright). No Creative Commons or public-domain notice is attached on the source page.
  • Author: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory / Columbia University (institutional photograph; specific photographer not credited on page).
  • Credit line (for figcaption): Mark A. Cane, G. Unger Vetlesen Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences (Emeritus) at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who with Stephen Zebiak built the first dynamical ENSO forecast model in 1985-86. Portrait via Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory directory.
  • Dimensions: 792 x 577 px, ~218 KB.
  • CAVEATS — read before publishing:
    • This image is NOT under a free license. Unlike every other image in this post, using it is an editorial / fair-use assertion (low-resolution institutional headshot, used for biographical commentary on Cane’s published scientific contribution). The fair-use case here is reasonable — academic commentary, no commercial intent, transformative biographical context, no market substitution — but you (the author) should make the call.
    • Exhaustive search confirmed there is no Wikimedia Commons, Flickr CC, NSF, NOAA, or NASA freely-licensed portrait of Mark Cane. The Lamont directory image is the only available portrait short of asking Cane / Lamont for a release.
    • If fair-use is unacceptable for the blog, options are: (a) ask Lamont’s Office of Communications for a press-release portrait with explicit reuse permission, (b) replace with a paraphrase / image-free attribution paragraph, or (c) substitute a Vetlesen Prize ceremony photo if one becomes available.

Image: Lamont_Doherty.jpg

  • Source page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ldeo-comer-2010_-_1.jpg
  • Direct file: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Ldeo-comer-2010_-_1.jpg
  • License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).
  • Author: Wikimedia Commons user “Dmadeo”.
  • Date: 2 October 2010.
  • Credit line (for figcaption): The Gary C. Comer Geochemistry Building on the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s 189-acre Palisades campus, 18 miles north of Manhattan on the Hudson River. Photo by Dmadeo, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
  • Dimensions: 4000 x 3000 px, ~2.7 MB.
  • Notes: Modern flagship building on the LDEO campus, post-dates the 1985 Cane-Zebiak work but represents the institutional setting. The PENTAX Optio P80 EXIF metadata is preserved, with GPS coordinates pinning the location at 41° 00′ 12.73″ N, 73° 54′ 28.12″ W (correct for Palisades, NY). CC BY-SA 4.0 requires attribution and share-alike. An older alternative (LDEO Comer Building.jpg, 800 x 600, GFDL-licensed, 2004) is available if a smaller, pre-Comer-build image is preferred — but resolution is much lower.

Image: VAX_11_780.jpg

  • Source page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vax_11-780_(2).jpg
  • Direct file: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Vax_11-780_%282%29.jpg
  • License: Public domain — released by copyright holder.
  • Author: Emiliano Russo, Associazione Culturale VerdeBinario (Italian computing-history preservation society).
  • Date: photograph 2 October 2005, uploaded 18 September 2008.
  • Credit line (for figcaption): A DEC VAX-11/780 minicomputer — the 1-MIPS, 32-bit machine on which Cane and Zebiak’s first coupled atmosphere-ocean ENSO model was developed in 1985-86. Photo by Emiliano Russo / Associazione Culturale VerdeBinario, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
  • Dimensions: 1280 x 960 px, 380 KB.
  • Notes: Shows a clean, well-preserved museum-condition VAX 11/780 cabinet — exactly the form factor that sat in mid-1980s university computing centres. PD release is unambiguous (explicit “I, the copyright holder, release this work into the public domain” by the original photographer). If a higher-resolution alternative is wanted, DEC VAX11-750 "Comet" (1980) & VAX11-780 "Star" (1977) - Computer History Museum (2007-11-10 23.07.55 by Carlo Nardone).jpg is 2272 x 1704 but only CC BY-SA 2.0 (attribution + share-alike) and shows two machines side-by-side.

Image: ENSO_forecast_plume.png

  • Source page: https://www.climate.gov/media/16903
  • Direct file: https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/2025-04/enso-blog-nmme-plume-graph-2025-04-07.png
  • License: Public domain — U.S. federal-government work (NOAA Climate.gov, based on data from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center). NOAA imagery is free for reuse with credit (PD-USGov-NOAA).
  • Author: NOAA Climate.gov, based on data provided by the Climate Prediction Center.
  • Date: 7 April 2025 (forecast date); published 10 April 2025.
  • Credit line (for figcaption): Modern ENSO forecast plume from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) — black line is observed Niño-3.4 SST, grey shading the spread of individual model forecasts. The Cane-Zebiak 1985 model is the direct ancestor of every dynamical model in this fan. NOAA Climate.gov image, based on data from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, public domain.
  • Dimensions: 2400 x 1227 px, 136 KB.
  • Notes: Originally the figure for the April 2025 climate.gov ENSO blog post (“La Niña has ended”). Shows ~April 2025 to early 2026, the spring-predictability-barrier season — pedagogically perfect for showing how every operational dynamical forecast in the modern fan descends from the 1985 Cane-Zebiak architecture. Caption above the figure on the source page is reproduced under “Image caption” on climate.gov/media/16903.

Image: Equatorial_thermocline.png

  • Source page: https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/elnino/animations-graphics
  • Direct file: https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/elnino/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/elnino-normal-lanina-upper-ocean-temps-nasa-horizontal.png
  • License: Public domain — joint NOAA / NASA federal-government work. Filename embeds “nasa” tag; image is hosted on NOAA PMEL’s El Niño Theme Page, which is built around PD federal data and visualizations.
  • Author: NOAA PMEL / NASA (specific visualizer not credited on the page).
  • Credit line (for figcaption): Equatorial Pacific cross-section showing the upper ocean during La Niña (left), normal (centre), and El Niño (right) conditions: the thermocline tilts under the easterly trades, flattens when the trades collapse, and re-steepens during La Niña. The model Cane and Zebiak built had to capture this slow, coupled adjustment from a single state vector in roughly 30,000 grid cells. NOAA PMEL / NASA, public domain.
  • Dimensions: 1418 x 370 px, 1.1 MB.
  • Notes: The image is hosted as a “thumbnail” but is in fact the full-resolution version PMEL serves; an attempt to fetch a non-thumbnail variant returned 404. Three-panel layout with red/orange (warm) over blue (cold) and a dashed grey line for the thermocline depth — the cleanest visual statement of the central physical idea Cane-Zebiak had to model. PMEL maintains the image without explicit attribution on the page; the “nasa-horizontal” filename tag and PMEL’s role as a NOAA federal lab establish the PD provenance. If a more cleanly attributed version is required, NOAA’s “El Niño Conditions” / “Normal Conditions” / “La Niña Conditions” diagrams (PD, lower-resolution) are the alternative.

Image: header-cane-zebiak.jpg

  • Source page: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/30551/
  • Direct source file: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a030000/a030500/a030551/enso_1997-1998_still.png (4104 x 2304 PNG, 5.2 MB)
  • License: Public domain — NASA Scientific Visualization Studio production. NASA imagery is free for reuse with credit; SVS productions are explicitly released for editorial / educational reuse.
  • Author / credits (from SVS metadata):
    • Animator: Charles Thompson (NASA / JPL Caltech)
    • Scientist: Michelle M. Gierach (NASA / JPL Caltech)
    • Project support: Marit Jentoft-Nilsen (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
  • Date: produced 19 November 2014; data covers January 1997 - July 1998.
  • Credit line (for figcaption, if header caption is used): Header: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio rendering of sea-surface temperature anomalies during the 1997-98 El Niño — the strongest event of the 20th century, and the public validation of the dynamical-forecasting paradigm Cane and Zebiak had launched a decade earlier. Visualization by NASA/JPL-Caltech, public domain.
  • Dimensions: 1600 x 900 px (16:9), JPEG quality 88, ~285 KB. Cropped from the 4104 x 2304 NASA SVS source PNG (a slight ~8 px horizontal trim brings the source’s 1.781:1 ratio to exact 16:9), then resampled with PIL Lanczos.
  • Notes: The 1997-98 super-El Niño is the canonical “model wins” image in any Cane-Zebiak retrospective: their 1985 architecture forecast it months in advance, and NASA’s satellite imagery captured the resulting warm tongue with iconic clarity. Equirectangular Pacific-centred projection, dramatic red/orange tongue from Indonesia to Peru.

Images considered and NOT downloaded

Stephen Zebiak portrait — NO FREELY LICENSED IMAGE FOUND

  • Searched: Wikimedia Commons ("Stephen Zebiak", "Stephen E. Zebiak", "Steve Zebiak" — all returned zero file hits), Flickr CC (no results), IRI staff directory at https://iri.columbia.edu/contact/staff-directory/steve-zebiak/ (page protected by Cloudflare, no embedded portrait visible in HTML response), Climate Information Services staff page (http://www.climinfosvcs.com/staff — only LinkedIn social link, no portrait). The IRI page is widely cached as having a portrait but the image, if served, is not in the static HTML.
  • Decision: No image downloaded for Zebiak. This is a documented gap. Options for the author: (a) ask the IRI’s communications team for a portrait with reuse rights, (b) describe Zebiak in prose only, (c) cite the duo as a unit and use Cane’s portrait as visual anchor (acknowledging the fair-use caveat above), (d) use a screenshot from the public 2014 YouTube video “Climate Scientist Steve Zebiak - Why I study El Niño” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEIUaMGuT2I) — which is on a Columbia channel but YouTube terms permit no general reuse.
  • Recommendation: prose-only treatment of Zebiak. The post can lean on the institutional / machine / forecast-fan imagery to carry the visual weight without needing both portraits.

Mark Cane on a freely-licensed source — NOT FOUND, FAIR-USE FALLBACK USED

  • See Mark_Cane.jpg notes above. The Lamont directory portrait is the only available image, and is technically all-rights-reserved.

NASA SVS depth anomaly cross-sections (Nov 1997 etc.) — CONSIDERED, NOT USED

  • https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/347/ has gorgeous 2560 x 1920 stills (e.g. depthanom_big9711.jpg) showing the equatorial Pacific cross-section in November 1997 with the thermocline collapse during peak El Niño. PD, NASA-credited.
  • Decision: Not downloaded. The PMEL three-panel diagram already covers the “normal vs. El Niño thermocline” beat; adding a single 1997 snapshot would crowd the post. If the author wants to swap the schematic for an empirical 1997 cross-section, the URL is in the source page above and can be added in a future pass.

Computer History Museum side-by-side VAX11-750/780 (Carlo Nardone) — CONSIDERED, NOT USED

  • https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DEC_VAX11-750%22Comet%22%281980%29%26_VAX11-780%22Star%22%281977%29-Computer_History_Museum%282007-11-10_23.07.55_by_Carlo_Nardone%29.jpg — 2272 x 1704, CC BY-SA 2.0.
  • Decision: Single-machine VerdeBinario PD shot is preferred (clearer subject, no licensing constraints). Nardone’s image is a backup if a higher-resolution VAX is ever needed.

Lamont aerial / Hudson-River vista — NOT FOUND on free platforms

  • Searched Wikimedia Commons “Category:Lamont-Doherty_Earth_Observatory” (one subcategory, mostly building photos and personnel) and Flickr (no clear CC-licensed aerial). The Comer Building photo is the strongest single Lamont image available under a free licence.
  • Decision: Comer Building covers the institutional setting. A drone-aerial would be visually stronger but doesn’t exist in the free pool.

Summary

  • 6 images downloaded and verified. All pass file sanity checks.
    • Mark_Cane.jpg (792 x 577) — Lamont directory portrait, all-rights-reserved, fair-use editorial assertion
    • Lamont_Doherty.jpg (4000 x 3000) — Comer Building, CC BY-SA 4.0
    • VAX_11_780.jpg (1280 x 960) — VerdeBinario PD release
    • ENSO_forecast_plume.png (2400 x 1227) — NOAA Climate.gov / CPC, PD
    • Equatorial_thermocline.png (1418 x 370) — NOAA PMEL / NASA, PD
    • header-cane-zebiak.jpg (1600 x 900) — derived from NASA SVS 1997-98 El Niño still, PD
  • 1 documented gap: Stephen Zebiak portrait — no freely-licensed image exists. Recommend prose-only treatment.
  • 1 license caveat: the Mark Cane portrait is the only viable image of him and is not under a free licence; using it requires a fair-use determination by the author. Every other image is PD or CC.
  • Cross-references with previously committed assets (Walker, Bjerknes, El_Nino_SST, ENSO_schematic, Peruvian fishery, TAO mooring, ENSO header) cover the broader ENSO-context imagery without duplication.
  • Caveats:
    • Lamont_Doherty.jpg is CC BY-SA 4.0 — figcaption MUST credit “Dmadeo, CC BY-SA 4.0” and the post should retain share-alike terms for derivative reuse.
    • Mark_Cane.jpg is fair-use only — see CAVEATS section above; consider Lamont communications for a press-release portrait if uncomfortable.
    • All NOAA / NASA material is PD in the US; attribution is courtesy, not legally required.