Three new analysis passes in scripts/recalibrate_algo.py that match the
scoring factors landed in commit 86364f4:
* NEXRAD composite reflectivity vs distance per band — checks that the
Marshall-Palmer rain rate in Scorer.dbz_to_rain_rate_mmhr/1 moves the
needle in the expected direction at 24+ GHz.
* hrrr_native_profiles.best_duct_band_ghz vs distance per band —
validates the 1.15× boost in Scorer.score_refractivity/4. Current
corpus shows essentially zero contacts with a native duct supporting
≥5 GHz at the target band, consistent with the 0.12% rate in Part 2c;
the boost is physics-correct but almost never fires today.
* Commercial-link rx_power degradation vs contemporaneous DFW contacts —
pearson + binned distance. Empty today because commercial_samples only
covers Mar 30–Apr 13 and contests don't overlap. Scaffolding is in
place so the moment contest-season overlap exists, the signal shows.
Report rebuilt at docs/algo-reports/2026-04-13-recalibration.md.
Direct queries against prod (75M HRRR profiles, 16,864 soundings, 392k
surface obs, new hrrr_native_profiles table) drive these changes:
* Reinstate shallow-BL bonus as an HPBL multiplier on the refractivity
score (1.10× <200m → 0.78× ≥2000m). The Apr 11 "shallow BL bonus
removed" conclusion was an artifact of the prior matching strategy;
with the cleaner contact↔HRRR join (n=680) the binned data goes 230 km
avg at HPBL <200m vs 100 km at ≥2000m, monotonic across all bins.
* Add 6 missing bands (142, 145, 288, 322, 403, 411 GHz) so contacts in
those bands stop being silently dropped. Coefficients extrapolate
ITU-R P.676/P.838 trends from the existing 134/241 GHz entries.
* Bump ERA5 poll timeout 10 min → 1 hour and Era5MonthBatchWorker
max_attempts 3 → 5 so CDS slowness stops discarding tiles. Also dump
the full failure body when CDS omits the message field — the prior
"ERA5 job failed: nil" was masking real error reasons in oban_jobs.
* Add scripts/recalibrate_algo.py so this analysis can be re-run any
time new data lands without manual SQL. Reads PROP_PROD_DB_URL from
.envrc, drops a Markdown report into docs/algo-reports/.
* Append a dated Part 2c to algo.md documenting the corpus expansion,
the honest accounting of historical HRRR coverage (only ~1,020 of 58k
contacts are precision-matchable), and the empty era5/rtma/climatology
tables. Update the gaseous-absorption and rain-attenuation tables to
include the new bands.
Test suite: 1,335 tests, 0 failures.
