 Science Steering Group: SSM/I: Special Sensor Microwave/Imager: SST: Sea The Sciences and Exploration Directorate is the largest Earth and space science research organization in the world. Its scientists advance understanding of the Earth and its life-sustaining environment, the Sun, the solar system, and the wider universe beyond. The Directorate is part of Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, :// Roy Warren Spencer (born Decem ) is a meteorologist, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight ://(scientist). Moreover, precipitation EWIs were also compared with Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) dataset. TRMM provides global daily precipitation estimates from a wide variety of meteorological satellites at ° spatial resolution for the period – (Huffman et al., ).
Ambrose Bierce was a private man. For all the millions of words he wrote in more than forty years as a journalist, and the hundreds of thousands of words he penned as a prolific correspondent, he made few direct statements about many of his most deeply held beliefs, and he was not given to chatting about his daily activities. To this degree, and to this alone, Ambrose Bierce matches the popular caricature of him--the misanthropic recluse spewing venom at the world.
And yet, it was Bierce himself who wrote his "memoirs" (as he termed them in a letter of 1908), by which he presumably meant the eleven essays he published in the first volume of his Collected Works under the general title "Bits of Autobiography." Most of these pieces had appeared in the newspapers and magazines for which Bierce wrote, the earliest (and best) of them, "What I Saw of Shiloh," as early as 1881. But if Bierce meant "Bits of Autobiography" to constitute his memoirs, are we to believe that nothing significant occurred in his life after 1875? For although the last item, "A Sole Survivor," is clearly the rumination of an old man who has seen his friends die one by one, the chronological sequence of "Bits of Autobiography" ends with his English visit of 1872 - 75.
Fortunately, there is in the remarkable richness of Bierce's corpus a wealth of autobiographical material--interpreting that phrase in a wider sense than merely a chronicle of the bare events of his life, to cover his piquant and challenging views of society and politics and his dicta on the principles of literature--that allows us to augment those "Bits of Autobiography" and present a few further glimpses into the long life and career of the saturnine journalist and master of the short story.
It is not surprising that Bierce offers yield little information about his upbringing. Born in 1842 to a poor and religiously (perhaps even fanatically) devout family of farmers in Meigs County, Ohio, he must have spent the years of his youth, the youngest of ten Bierce children (each with a first name beginning with the letter A), attempting to earn a hard living from the earth. Although he proclaimed himself a lifelong atheist, Bierce must have absorbed some elements of his parents' extreme Christian views, for he exhibited a lifelong puritanical intolerance for unchastity (especially in women) and judged friend and foe alike by an unwavering and rigid moral standard that took no account of differing customs or changing times.
It was mere circumstance that allowed Bierce to expand his physical and mental horizons beyond the narrow confines of his youthful environment. He first stayed briefly with his uncle Lucius Verus Bierce, a well-known politician and lawyer who took Bierce in at his residence in Akron, Ohio, in 1859, more than a decade after Bierce's own family had moved to Indiana. Later that year Bierce enrolled for a year at the Kentucky Military Institute, but of his tenure there nothing is known. Then, while Bierce was idling at home in Indiana in the spring of 1861, the Civil War broke out.
If nothing else, Bierce's participation in some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War--Shiloh, Chickamauga, Franklin---allowed him in later years to set down some of the most memorable accounts we have of those conflicts; and although several were written more than forty years after the events, they harmonize in every significant particular with the known facts. Bierce's memories of the war are found not only in his formal essays; many shorter and more informal recollections scattered throughout his journalistic work, reprinted here for the first time, substantially augment our knowledge of Bierce's involvement in the war.
Eight of the eleven "Bits of Autobiography" concern Bierce's experiences during and immediately following the war; did he, perhaps, believe that the most exciting period of his life was lived by 1865? In a sense it was: physically he would never be the same (the gunshot wound in the head, received in 1864, was nearly fatal, and for the rest of his life he was susceptible to searing headaches as a result of his injury), while his psychological state as a veteran who had somehow survived when so many of his companions had perished can only be conjectured. Although Bierce left the army for good in 1866, for the whole of his life he considered himself more soldier than civilian, and it is no surprise that his first collection of tales focuses on that distinction in its very title.
But for the immediate future there was work to be considered. A stint as an aide to the Treasury Department in Alabama during Reconstruction proving markedly unsatisfactory, Bierce joined his old friend and erstwhile commander, General William B. Hazen, in a trip to the uncharted wilderness of the West on an exploratory mission. He abandoned the party at San Francisco in early 1867; although he did not know it then, he would, for the next thirty years, be intimately identified with the Bay Area. What led Bierce to become a writer is unclear; certainly, his earliest pieces--a few poems and an essay on female suffrage for the Californian--are stiff and undistinguished. But he got a needed break when, after writing a number of unsigned items for the San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser, he was hired as its regular columnist late in 1868. Bierce's career as an editorialist had begun.
The paragraphs of random commentary Bierce wrote for the News Letter are a testament more to his energy than to his emotional maturity; for the 2500-word columns that appeared weekly almost without a break for more than three years are, in actual substance, very much the callow reflections of a young man eager to prove to the world--or, at least, to the local community--his wit, his outrageousness, and his defiance of convention. In the rough-and-tumble world of post-'49er San Francisco, where several other newspapers competed with the News Letter, including the Chronicle, the Bulletin, the Call, and the Alta California, Bierce's provocative opinions on religion, women, and politics found a receptive audience; and, as early as the summer of 1869, they also found recognition in the pages of so august a journal as the Nation, which felt that the western firebrand was worth introducing to its refined readership.
It was in the News Letter that Bierce articulated a defense of the unrelenting satire that would consume much of the rest of his career. From the beginning he was faced with the naive criticism that satire of his sort--the tart, at times biting satire of Juvenal, Swift, and Voltaire, which did not refrain from naming names, which disdained the tickle of a feather and stung with the rapier's slash--was somehow inherently improper, beyond the bounds of civilized discourse, and the product of personal spite. It may be true that some of Bierce's earlier and cruder work is mere vilification, although even this has its amusing qualities; but the overwhelming bulk of his work features satire that is both pungent and thought-provoking, marked by a carefully considered intellectual stance even at its most vicious. Few perceived that the objects of Bierce's scorn were condemned in such a way as clearly to suggest his approval of their opposite.
Given Bierce's notoriety, it is perhaps not surprising that he courted and won the well-bred society lady Mary Ellen ("Mollie") Day for his wife, marrying her on Christmas Day of 1871. Bierce's silence about his wife, and about the course of their long and often troubled marriage, is telling; even in private correspondence she is rarely mentioned, although we have several affecting letters by Bierce to his three children as well as to the wife of his nephew Carlton, whom he seemed to regard with as much tenderness as his own offspring. As with his relations with his parents, Bierce's attitude toward Mollie can only be inferred with caution from his creative work--from his celebrated definition of "Marriage" in The Devil's Dictionary ("The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two") to the numerous paragraphs in the News Letter and elsewhere on the miseries of married couples, the loathsomeness of babies, and the alarmingly frequent suicides, homicides, and infanticides within the family circle.