Yesterday, I closed out the year in which I earned my Ph.D., and in which the atmosphere reminded meteorological community, via new records for tornadoes and also tornado fatalities, that it still has a great deal to teach us.
Let’s face it, it’s winter, and there’s not much going on, severe weather-wise. The only new thing you’ll find here is a Favorite Links page (accessible via a tab above) that I finally got around to assembling. When I checked up on my fellow chasers’ blogs to make sure the links were still active, I found that many hadn’t been updated since early November 2011 (immediately after the Tipton / Wichita Mountains / Ft. Cobb tornado day), so I don’t feel too bad.
In truth, my last two months’ worth of writing energy was expended producing two manuscripts. However, I have numerous ideas for blog posts rolling around in my head. I’m planning a series of posts about peer review, along with a book review or two. And, of course, I eagerly await the meteorological smorgasbord and explorations that 2012 will surely bring!
I’m thankful for having had the pleasure of watching several of my classmates pass their general examinations this semester. “The general” constitutes the last major hurdle before the dissertation defense, and a successful examinee becomes “A.B.D.” (all but dissertation). As a recent Ph.D. recipient, I have aggregated a few nuggets of advice for them. Some of these items may seem self-evident in hindsight, but may not be to those upon which the stress is piled higher and deeper.
No escaping it, the dissertation is a daunting undertaking. It can seem insurmountable. The key to getting it done is to break it apart and tackle each chapter, section, and subsection individually. As the old saying goes, “How do you eat an elephant? … One bite at a time.”
You must make dissertation writing a habit from now on. Set a writing schedule and stick to it. (For a scientific discussion of why this works, read Paul Silvia’s book How to Write a Lot, which I extolled in a previous post.)
Ultimately, your name will be the only one on the spine in gold leaf, but no one writes a dissertation in a vacuum. Keep a list of people who helped you and notes about how they contributed. This list will easily transform into your acknowledgments section. Speaking of which…
The acknowledgment section is the only section of the dissertation over which you have complete control, so have fun with it. Give enthusiastic shout-outs to those who made your journey smoother. Include photos, anecdotes, poetry, whatever you want!
Be defensive about your time. You need to maintain laserlike focus on your goal. In the semesters prior to your defense, reclaim your time by load-shedding, and don’t take on new commitments. Let others know that your availability will be limited in the coming months, so that they can adjust. This advice is particularly relevant to women, since we are conditioned to try to please everyone. Learn to say, “No.” Be polite and pleasant, but also firm.
Some of your biggest stumbling blocks may be internal. There will be days when you simply don’t feel like writing. You will suffer setbacks. There will be days you feel like throwing up your hands and walking away from the whole endeavor. Always remember that you are not the first Ph.D. candidate to feel this way (although many of us think we are). A support group that meets over coffee once a week can be beneficial for working through your issues. If your internal blocks are too great for you or your support group to bear, consider seeking help from your school’s professional counseling services.
Do what you have to do to maintain your focus. Close your office door. If you share an office, use a visual signal to communicate when you do not want to be interrupted. (In my case, I wore a pair of over-the-ear headphones to tell my officemates that I was “in the zone.” Another of my colleagues put out a black rose on her desk when she did not want to be disturbed.) I also made extensive use of overnight hours, when distractions were at a minimum.
Stay physically active. Writing a dissertation involves sitting on your butt in front of a glowing screen for long periods of time. If you don’t take care of your body, no one else will. Don’t neglect diet and exercise, even when it’s crunch time. Stick to your exercise regimen. If you get stuck on a paragraph, a simple 10-minute walk outside can be a great refresher.
Keep your right brain busy, too. Analysis, derivation, and logic all fall to our left brains, and its fruits are traditionally over-represented in the dissertation. Don’t let the creative, nonlinear strengths of your right brain fall by the wayside. Paint, draw, sing, play a musical instrument, write poetry, laugh. Would you work out with only half a barbell?
Keep copious electronic notes that are easy to search. Our parents’ generation used note cards to organize information. We now have electronic tools that can do many of the same things. In my case, I created a (private) blog on LiveJournal and documented everything related to my dissertation there, including my thought processes, conversations with others, small epiphanies, and even more mundane things like compiler options. I used tags to organize it so that I could quickly reference past entries, a practice that saved me a great deal of time when I had to retrace my steps.
When you dedicate yourself so completely to studying one topic or case, literally for years, your brain will naturally yearn to work on other things. You will have flashes of inspiration for projects that aren’t related to your Ph.D. research at all. When new project ideas come, write them down, and save them for later. I kept a document called “Future projects?”, and one of those ideas turned into my postdoc.
Be kind to yourself. Set attainable, bite-sized goals, and don’t forget to reward yourself when you reach them.
Remember, you’ve progressed further toward your dreams than 99% of the population. You are the cream that rose to the top. You are stronger than you think you are. Be proud of that fact.
I’d been anticipating this chase opportunity for nearly a week. In spite of that, my chase partners and I showed up late for the party. And in spite of that, we still witnessed a unique sight: a tornado interacting with the Wichita Mountains.
It’s fall in Oklahoma, and the jet stream is moseying back south. A couple of high-amplitude troughs have already swung low across the state, bringing chilly temperatures on brisk northwesterly winds. The long-range models were hinting at another such trough last week, but this one also brought surface moisture, ample deep-layer shear, and steepening mid-level lapse rates with it. There was no reason to hold back.
Our initial target was Altus. My chase partners (Dan, Jana, Jing) and I planned to leave Norman just after lunch. As usual, one thing after another delayed us by a few minutes at a time. Suddenly, somehow, it was 2:00 p.m., and supercells were already grinding across western Oklahoma. One near Frederick quickly dominated the others, all but flashing a neon “CHASE ME” sign. So, after far too much dawdling, we hastily piled into my car and blasted southwest along I-44.
During our haul southwest, our social media feeds lit up with quick pics of a fat, high-contrast cone near Tipton, OK. Earlier in my chase career, it was typical for me to arrive at a tornado-producing supercell, only to have it greet me by gusting out. Obviously, that still happens sometimes, and it’s always a kick in the wallet when a storm I’ve driven hundreds of miles to intercept mockingly turns to grunge in front of my eyes. Internally, I steeled myself for that possibility.
As we approached Lawton, Mt. Scott and the rest of the Wichita Mountains (actually some of the oldest mountains in North America, whose geologic history you can read about here) loomed against slate-gray rain curtains on the horizon. We were about 30 miles from a second tornado reported to be approaching Snyder, a town that had a prior abusive relationship with a tornado. We craned and strained but could not see any cloud base structure at so great a distance.
We debated our plan of attack. Heading west on U.S. Hwy 62 was not an option because the tornado had just crossed it at a 40 mph clip. Jana reminded us that OK-49, the next E-W highway to the north crossing the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, has a speed limit of 45 mph. Then we remembered the paved ribbon running west out of Elgin to Meers Restaurant, and took it. As we turned right past the cattle pens, promising ourselves a Meers burger some other time, Dan got a text message from Lou Wicker suggesting that we head northwest on OK-115 and intercept the storm near Saddle Mountain.
The mountains, of course, blocked our view of the cloud base for much of our approach. But all the signs aloft (updraft, clear slot) keyed our attention on a darkening shaft behind the scrubby ridges. My certainty of a rain-wrapped tornado surged we rolled up on it: Rain-wrapped tornado in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge (OK) at about 4:10 p.m. CST
We stopped shortly thereafter and caught the tornado crossing the inverted chins of stone comprising Saddle Mountain, and later passing in front of the wind farm just to its northeast. We observed it for about 15 minutes, repositioning once, and never saw another vehicle the entire time. Here’s my video.
Note that the trees on the hillsides are turning red – it really is autumn in Oklahoma!
I’d never witnessed a tornado interacting with complex terrain from such a short distance before, so observing its looping contortions was an unexpected treat. I also hadn’t gotten to watch a tornado in solitude for many a year. Apart from two news helicopters hovering behind us, my companions and I had the tornado all to ourselves. I kept expecting other cars to go zooming past, but the road behind us stayed curiously, almost eerily, vacant. We’re guessing the wildlife preserve forced many of the other chasers to divert around it to the west; very few came at it from the east. Sometimes, being late to the show has its advantages.
After the Wichita Mountains tornado was swallowed by a descending reflectivity core, we were hard pressed to catch up to it. We crossed the damage path (plastic bags, bits of sheet metal, and other miscellaneous trash caught in barbed wire fences and trees) just north of Saddle Mountain, nearly flattening a tire on a laid-out stop sign, then stair-stepped along gravel roads near Albert, occasionally catching sight of promising shallow cones dipping out of the cloud base. On the descent into Fort Cobb, we finally found the chase hordes, fixated on a multi-vortex tornado lazily twirling just west of town: Multi-vortex tornado near Fort Cobb, Oklahoma
After that, we rapidly fell behind the storm, and daylight dwindled to dark grayish-blue. We headed back to Norman by way of Tuttle – our favorite dust devil chasing spot this past summer, and were back at the NWC before 7:00 p.m.
NWS documented at least 6 tornadoes from this storm, including the two we witnessed. My husband was able to take more video than I was, because I was driving. Here’s his highlights reel for this chase:
Two interesting follow-ups to this one:
Two Oklahoma Mesonet stations suffered damage from yesterday’s storms and stopped reporting data. According to the Mesonet Ticker, at least one of the stations (Tipton) was laid waste by a tornado. This has never happened before in the 17-year history of the Oklahoma Mesonet, and two have two stations destroyed in one day is nothing short of phenomenal.
About two hours after our return to Norman, the ground began shaking again. We’ve had a series of small-to-moderate earthquakes (magnitudes 4.7, 5.6, and 4.7, in that order) caused by a known fault near Prague, Oklahoma. So, I got to experience both an earthquake and a tornado in the same day. I crossed an item off my bucket list that I didn’t even know was on it!
Here’s a lightning shot from the storm that delayed he OU-Texas Tech football game on Saturday: Lightning over east Norman on Saturday, 22 Oct 2011
This same round of storms had intermittent embedded supercells. One developing BWER appeared to pass right over our house. Farther northeast, a tornado was reported near Boley, OK. That tornado appeared to come out of a left-moving supercell. We were out of position to chase that one as it raced away toward the northeast along I-44.
I recently attended the 35th AMS Radar Meteorology Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This biennial conference gathers meteorologists and engineers to talk about recent advances in weather radar.
Thursday poster session at the 35th AMS Radar Meteorology Conference
A key word at this conference was calibration. Dr. V. Chandrasekar (author of a primary textbook, Polarimetric Doppler Weather Radar) gave a passionate key note talk lamenting the lack of field-wide standards for calibration of polarimetric measurements. How do we know that what we’re measuring from hundreds of kilometers away is accurate?
I gave one oral and one poster presentation about my current work, and chaired a session of six talks on VORTEX2 results. While oral presentations get recorded, I actually prefer poster sessions because I get to interact one-on-one with other conference attendees and potentially find new collaborators. Of course, I love chatting with friends, as well! Tim Marshall stops by my poster describing a recent GBVTD study.
We also got glimpses of the future, mostly in the form of prototypes and test data from new platforms. There were numerous talks about dual-pol, about phased array, and about dual-pol phased array. Several different groups are trying to tackle design issues inherent to a dual-pol phased array radar, including my engineer colleagues at UMass. My V2 engineer, Krzysztof Orzel, is part of one of these teams. His talk about their development of a mobile, dual-pol phased array system won him the Geotis Prize for the best oral presentation by a student. So, how soon can I put this new radar in front of a tornado? Krzysztof’s keeping mum on that point for now!
After shaking hands, sharing food, and pushing elevator buttons with dozens of my colleagues, some of whom flew here from Europe and Japan, it was no great surprise that I flew home with the first symptoms of a cold. To paraphrase one of my colleagues, Dr. Pam Heinselman, scientific conferences are great for the exchange of ideas, but also for the exchange of germs!
Although the headline implies defeat, the article itself conveys intellectual arousal.This afternoon, I checked into BBC News, and found an intriguing science headline near the top of the page. The article briefly summarized CERN observations that – if confirmed – would show conclusively, for the first time, that particles can travel faster than light. The implications of this result are no less than staggering; warp drive would be a step closer to reality! Don’t look for Captain Kirk and crew to materialize overhead tomorrow, because the particles in question are sub-atomic particles called neutrinos. But how can anyone not react to such news with fascination and wonder?
What raised my hackles was BBC News’ choice of headline: “Light-speed results baffle scientists.”
“Baffled scientists” headlines are a real pet peeve of mine. In 2007, I presented a lecture (okay, it was more of a rant) on this topic to my Severe and Unusual Weather class, just after Tropical Storm Humberto spun up to hurricane status a scant few hours prior to landfall. Generally, tropical cyclones weaken as they approach the shore, as part of the TC moves over land and the storm becomes partly cut off from its fuel source – the warm waters on the ocean’s surface. The spinup of Humberto (as was the overland re-intensification of Tropical Storm Erin earlier that fall) was unusual and noteworthy.
Annoyingly, the resulting headline on the front page of CNN.com the next morning was something to the effect of, “Forecasters baffled by Humberto’s sudden strengthening.” (The article no longer appears in the CNN.com archives, or I would link to it.) I posted this headline (along with some variants from other news sources) on my lecture slides, then had my students read the NHC forecast discussion for then-Tropical Storm Humberto that was issued just prior to landfall. It contains the following:
HOUSTON WSR-88D VELOCITY DATA INDICATE THAT HUMBERTO HAS INTENSIFIED... SOME ADDITIONAL STRENGTHENING COULD OCCUR BEFORE THE CENTER MAKES LANDFALL EARLY ON THURSDAY...AND WINDS COULD BE APPROACHING HURRICANE FORCE OVER A SMALL AREA NEAR HUMBERTO'S CENTER WHEN IT REACHES THE COAST.
The NHC forecasters were hardly “baffled.” In fact, they acknowledged that Humberto’s attainment of hurricane status was within the envelope of possibility. I challenged my students to reconcile the NHC discussion with the headlines, and we had an insightful in-class dialogue about it.
Scientists baffled? Experts baffled? Doctors baffled? In most cases, the choice of the verb “to baffle” is incorrect. According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, “to baffle” means “to defeat by puzzling or confusing.” It is the notion of defeat that I find offensive. Defeat marks the end of a battle. Is the “defeated” scientist going to stalk out of the lab, all time and effort spent for naught, hanging his or her head in humiliation, and grudgingly apply for a job at the nearest Burger King? Hardly. Puzzlement and confusion usually signal the beginning of a new scientific effort, not the end! Any scientist worth his or her salt will not throw up his or her hands in the face of compelling evidence that contravenes established understanding, but rather run to the nearest keyboard and draft up a new grant proposal or e-mail query to knowledgeable colleagues. That’s exactly what the BBC report describes – the CERN scientists publicized their finding in order to obtain a quick, informal, open-ended peer review. (Incidentally, peer review is a topic I plan to cover another day!)
Of course, “baffled scientist” headlines wouldn’t get so many clicks if they didn’t have such popular appeal. Readers evidently like to imagine that the relentless brainiacs they knew in high school, whose hands eagerly shot up to correctly answer every question the science teacher asked, and whose test scores they could never hope to exceed, are now utterly flummoxed by some data point that they can’t immediately explain. Granted, I identify more with the latter group than the former, but I still come away with the mental image of lab coat-clad eggheads scratching their greasy heads in humble astonishment. Those nerds aren’t so smart as they thought, eh?
The next time you see the words “scientists baffled” in a headline, try replacing “baffled” with “surprised” or “intrigued.” (And to those of you who report on science, please grab a nearby thesaurus!) Understand that you are probably reading the first chapter of someone’s discovery process. The universe has no solutions manual; it is the solutions manual, and we’ve barely deciphered a neutrino-size part of it.
As you may have inferred from my last entry, I recently took a vacation to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. A sublime experience, and definitely worthy of inclusion on the Great American bucket list. After all, the park belongs to everyone, just like the weather.
Inside the bubbling, fuming caldera, Dan and I caught a few nice steam devils spinning off the park’s famous geysers:
I can only imagine they’d be better in the winter, when the temperature contrast between the geothermally heated waters and the overlying atmosphere is all the greater.
Going to a National Park is kind of like storm chasing… complete with chaser convergence. Just swap in bears for tornadoes as the primary photo/video quarry. Whenever a bear appears within sight of a road, everyone pulls their vehicles over, and tripods and telescoping lenses are deployed. We witnessed some rather silly behavior by people dodging in and out of traffic trying to get their “money shots.” But in the end, everyone was there for the same reason – to experience nature’s majesty first hand. Lower Falls, Yellowstone NP Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone NP Steam over Excesior Geyser, Yellowstone NP Some of the 3,700 resident bison of Yellowstone NP Sunset over the Grand Tetons, 20 August 2011
I hope you enjoy this highlight of my recent vacation.
I’m particularly fascinated by the fog in the Snake River Valley in the foreground. As we all know, denser, cooler air tends to flow downhill and “pool” in low-lying areas. If you take an evening or morning walk, you’ll notice that the temperature in river valleys, or even creek beds, is a few degrees cooler than it is uphill. In this video, mixing fog marks the interface between the cool and warm air. If the interface between the cool air and the warmer air above is disturbed, internal gravity waves should propagate along that interface. I believe that’s the source of the “sloshing” seen in the fog layer.
I’m not on the East Coast for Irene, but some of my colleagues are. A subset of VORTEX2 vehicles (SMART-R2, TTU Ka-bands, UAH-MAX, and a mobile mesonet or two) and personnel waited on the North Carolina coast for a red-eye landfall. In addition, RaXPol is getting its hurricane baptism!
As of this writing, Hurricane Irene is a Category 1, with sustained winds of 85 mph, and the best damage the TV news crews can seem to find is some siding peeling off beachfront property. Is Irene being overhyped? I don’t think so. In contrast to previous hurricanes, the threat to humans from Irene is more water-based than wind-based. Flooding will likely be exacerbated by the expansive areal coverage of the hurricane and its relatively slow movement. In addition, Irene (or what’s left of it) is progged to make landfall in SE NY around high tide. Evacuating the low-lying areas around the coast is a prudent move.
I didn’t shoot this video; my fellow storm chaser Mike Hollingshead did. I’m simply among the many who find it fascinating:
No, it’s not a sign of the end times. As an entomologist explained on NPR, midges love marshy areas, and this year’s floods in western Iowa have turned large expanses of farmland into prime breeding habitat.
If I can chase dust devils, I’m certainly not going to fault Mike for chasing bugnadoes! As he comments at the beginning of the video, “a vortex is a vortex to a storm chaser.”
