Graya's Science Journal

First Saturday Home

2009-11-08T01:21:48Z

For the past couple days, we've had rain squalls roaming through the city like they own it... hail, graupel, and serious lightning storms (see what our meteorology superstar Cliff Mass has to say about it) that are quite out of character for the Seattle I moved to ~15 years ago. So... so what? Seattle does not stop for rain, and neither does the Green Seattle Partnership, which provided tools, work gloves, and Helly Hansen foul weather gear for us tree-planting volunteers on Green Seattle Day. I went with a friend, and we got caught up while tamping down the worm-ridden soil around little huckleberries, ferns, red cedars, and madrones. There are vague plans now for fishing, and a slight possibility of sailing, two activities I could stand to get back in my life...

Meanwhile, my work with the local chapter of Surfrider is about to achieve its first big milestone: we're launching the pilot project for the Blue Water Task Force this coming friday. I'm thrilled we have started a collaboration with a lab at UW's Department of Environmental and Occupational Health; we'll be collecting sand samples for their research into MRSA hanging out in the sand of our local beaches, and they're offering lab space, training, the use of their autoclaves so we don't have to rely on one-use-only equipment. We're also aiming for EPA certification, so our water quality analysis results can be incorporated into the data collected by the state's departments of ecology and health (the BEACH program).

It's taken me about a week to fully recover from the jet-lag and get readjusted to something resembling daywatch in local time -- although with the change to Standard Time and our short Northern winter days, you might think it wouldn't be that different. If I could get the lights that lined the Main Lab and the mess on the Knorr installed at work, it would probably only take a day to make the switch.

The End of the Cruise and the Long Trip Home

2009-11-01T00:49:40Z

Waiting for Us at the End of the Cruise

We finally found the ice, on the last day of the cruise coming into Nuuk harbor. A number of the crew had remarked that there were very few icebergs along the cruise track this year, which was good for us because we didn't have to slow down and finished almost every CTD station on the Principal Investigators' (PIs) wish list. Watching the 2nd and 3rd mates maneuver the Knorr through the gauntlet of growlers -- a term for small bits of icebergs, too small to show up on radar, that make a nasty growling sound as they slide down your hull and rip it open -- in broad daylight brought home just how much slower we would have had to go if we had run into a patch during nightwatch, even with the Knorr's shiny new ice lights.

Many kudos go to the crew for making the Davis Strait '09 cruise successful. The back-to-back nighttime Seaglider recoveries, the mooring deployments in high seas that went on for days and days, the terrible things we did to the CTD in the name of science... none of that would have been possible if the crew hadn't been there for us 100 percent.

Going Home

After a mad dash making sure that all the data we got during the cruise was copied to USB drives and burnt on DVDs, packing, saying our goodbyes... we hopped in Dash-7s, the backbone of Greenland Air's domestic fleet, and flew from Nuuk to the international airport in Kangerlussuaq, where the domestic flights are at Gate 1 and the international flights are at Gate 2. It was snowing pretty heavily and the temperature around noon sank to -11°C.

A little over 4 hours later we were in Copenhagen, where some of us are taking saturday off to explore before continuing the long flight home. This is a light-boat we found tied up in the canal by Nyhavn, not far from a series of adorable coffee shops and pastry houses. Need I say how incredible that first double-tall hazelnut soy latte that I had after a month at sea was, or how delicious an actual Danish danish is? Or how bittersweet it is to go home when your heart is at sea?

What Comes Next

My adviser is concerned that observational oceanography is a field in jeopardy, that far too many of today's physical oceanographers are content to let someone else fetch data for them to use without consideration for the effort and skill required to collect quality measurements. It is true that satellites, robots and electronic sensors on moorings have revolutionized the field, and without a doubt this is where the future of ocean observing lies -- but there is so much that happens during even a deployment and recovery cruise that requires an in-depth understanding of the physical processes of the region and the ability to adapt a program to the reality of the environment you find yourself in, that it would not be possible without years of training and experience in the field. I truly hope that every graduate student who would do oceanography makes the effort to go out on an observational cruise at least once in their career, because reasoning and theorizing about the world we live in is not science unless it begins and ends with seeing that world clearly and carefully.

Furthest Point South

2009-10-26T10:28:54Z

Only 3 days left in the cruise and we have just reached the southernmost CTD station. We've paused just south of the sill of Davis Strait, a sort of foray into the deep end of the pool -- also known as the Labrador Sea. The CTD is dipping down to 2570 meters, but due to the currents, we may need to lay out 90 additional meters of line to get there. We're keeping an eye out for an 8-degree water mass which should be coming north around the southern tip of Greenland and possibly slipping west into the Labrador sea, but we haven't found it yet.

With so much wire to put out and a winch that runs at 60 meters per minute, the entire station may take 2 hours, whereas the shallow casts on the Canadian shelf were averaging 20 minutes. As there is very little for the CTD handlers to do between deploying the CTD and bringing it back aboard, it was a long, slow, and uneventful night. Inbetween the occasional bouts of activity in the snow on deck, I read a couple recent papers in the Journal of Physical Oceanography and learned how to play cribbage. The current chief scientist is from Cape Breton in Canada, where apparently everyone plays cribbage (in addition to playing fiddle and saying "new-fund-LAND"). I'm hoping to challenge him to another game during the next watch, but by then we'll be on the edge of the Greenland shelf, where our CTD casts will once again be short, shallow, and close together.

one unfortunate reading = 4 hours missing

2009-10-23T05:16:21Z

01:00 Friday, Nightwatch: We got this kink in the wire when the CTD touched the bottom with several meters of wire loose... the echosounder reported bottom depths that were ~150m deeper than we were actually in, and the CTD altimeter alarm went off too late for the CTD Watch guy to tell the winch operator to stop in time... so now we have at least 4 hours of downtime while the SSSGs work to cut the wire and re-terminate it above the kink. So we're skipping the last CTD station in the line (which didn't require water samples to be taken, anyway) and are heading down to the next line, which is ~4.5 hours of away to minimize our losses.

Quick Stop in Sisimiut; CTD Tribulations

2009-10-22T07:08:03Z

With all the mooring work done, the chief scientist, his research partner, the awesome mooring tech guy, and the local grad student left the ship in Sisimiut Harbor. The town is so small, it practically is the harbor, perched on the few mostly horizontal spaces on the edge of the steep, snow-covered rocky outcroppings. We were very fortunate that the winds died down and we had a beautiful, calm autumn morning with air temperatures around -4.2C (~24.5F). I seem to have acclimated to the weather, because I spent a lot of time running around on deck with my camera but without my jacket. Eh, it's okay, I did have my Icebreaker merino wool pullover -- after all, Sisimiut is north of the Arctic Circle.

This little fishing boat anchored in the harbor caught everyone's eye, it was so picturesque. The folks with the D-SLR cameras and real lenses no doubt got much prettier versions, but at least you can see what I mean. With everything so calm, you really get the romantic sense of the fishing life up in the far cold reaches of the world.

The houses and residential buildings in Greenland tend to be painted in these dramatic, rich hues of blue, dark red, green and goldenrod yellow. But all the land is owned by the government and so are the buildings; you can't just buy a vacation cabin in Greenland for your summer holidays. It will be interesting to see what happens here as Greenland transitions to self-government.

Remember when I talked about packing the container a few weeks before we were to get on the R/V Knorr in Nuuk? Now that the mooring work is done, it's time to pack almost everything back in it -- all that's left is some glider stuff that we kept out (just in case) and our own personal gear. We have one solid week of CTDs 24/7 to do, and now we're having problems with the salinity sensors and possibly one of the pumps on the CTD rosette. We will probably stop to fix them now... however long it will take... and then work like mad to make up the time lost. Hopefully this won't take too long.

Four Moorings Redeployed, and O Canada!

2009-10-17T04:58:00Z

We did CTDs through the night in 35+knot winds; my watch ended at 7 in the morning, after which I promptly went to sleep, so I could get up a few hours later when the daywatch guys had finished the last of the CTD stations, transited north, and deployed the first mooring near Baffin Island. There was an iceberg north of us, near the horizon (the ship's mates like to keep those icebergs as far away as possible), and visibility was fairly poor. There was an awesome jagged black promontory that appeared to the south of us for a few minutes, but by the time I'd fetched my camera, the fog had obscured it again.

The moorings are essentially a series of instruments attached to kevlar line and some small lengths of steel chain (typically painted to avoid corrosion). This is a small frame with an ADCP for measuring current speed and direction at a variety of distances, an external battery and logger, and an SBE37 microcat for measuring temperature and salinity.

Another instrument commonly deployed on these moorings are Aanderaa RCM-8s, current meters made back in the '80s. Nowhere near as high-tech as the ADCPs, they measure velocity and direction of horizontal currents at one depth -- simple and sturdy still goes a long way in observational oceanography.

So why are we deploying these things? There are two interesting currents here at the base of Davis Strait -- warm, salty Atlantic water flows northward along the western coast of Greenland, and cold, fresher Arctic water flows southward the eastern coast of northern Canada. There's some recirculation that happens to differing amounts during the year and it would be good to know what affects the strength of that recirculation; there's the question of whether there are any trends in the overall net southward flow -- is it warming? is there more or less ice or ice melt coming through? Combined with the analyses that will be done on the water samples taken during all those CTD casts, there should be a pretty good story about the water masses that flow through Davis Strait, a/k/a the Arctic Gateway to the Atlantic.

PS: The grad student working on the physical oceanography side of this is B. Curry, not me. I just got lucky this year with timing and got to be the one on the cruise.

Sparks on the foremast

2009-10-12T04:10:06Z

02:00 12 October: Most of the science team was asleep after that heroic/insane glider recovery, Kunuk and I were up on the bridge with the second mate when a series of sparks lit up the bottom of the mast and the ice lights went out. Lovely. So off goes the general alarm, and now we're all up in the main lab, waiting to the excitement while the crew tracks this annoyance down and searches the boat for problems.

On the whole, it's better than being woken up at 2 AM by drunks yelling in the 7-11 parking lot...

Nighttime Seaglider Recovery

2009-10-12T03:34:09Z

SG141 was pumping too slowly, so we had to go pick her up again. My adviser had her stay on the surface while we steamed up to her -- it took nearly 2 hours to get there, and by then it was 23:08 and quite dark, with winds blowing near 35 knots. SG141 has a stubby antenna with reflective tape on the end which lights up like a brilliant candle on the water when we hit it with the ship's spotlights, which the crew did at 23:15. She was right off the starboard bow, and the captain lined her up beautifully -- but by then the sea state was awful, and whenever the glider got near the bosun with the pole to nab her, the sea dragged her down and we had to spend another nail-biting eternity looking for her. In all, we ended up making 4 attempts, and bully for the bosun for nabbing her that last time!

One hour and fifteen minutes after spotting her, the deck team finally had her aboard, and then we had to dog all the doors for what is proving to be a rough ride north to the next line of CTD stations. Wind's up at 40 knots now, and it will probably take us 14 hours to get where we're going. In the meantime, I've got to swab the floor of the main lab down again -- the main lab doors just can't hold the sea out when the waves come splashing around the CTD hangar, and even dogged and caulked with rags, we still have to pull the mops out periodically.

Day 4 feels like 40

2009-10-11T03:43:39Z

Today was a good day for picking up moorings -- this is the last one picked up at the very end of the day, a sound source placed just out of sight of the mountainous coast of Baffin Island. It took about an hour and a half from contacting the mooring acoustically to pulling aboard the acoustic release at the bottom of the mooring.

We also deployed SG143, the same glider that gave us so much trouble during the North Atlantic Spring Bloom 2008 experiment in the Iceland Basin, but with much less instrumentation. Now (23:09 local time) we are doing the calibration cast -- running the CTD down to 1000m alongside the diving glider to find out just how good its temperature, salinity, and oxygen measurements are. It's snowing on us, the wind has picked up to 16 knots, and the air temperature is fairly warm, hovering around 0.4C (32.7F).

Tonight I tried a Danish snack that I got in a grocery store in Nuuk; Salted Licorice. You know those salted caramels you can get at every fancy gourmet chocolate shop in Seattle? Yeah, this is nothing like that -- the first taste is salty sweet, and then the licorice kicks in and I start making funny faces. Fortunately, the guy in charge of all the water sampling we've been doing (Oxygen isotopes, Total-Inorganic-Carbon/Total-Alkalinity, and nitrate/nitrite/phosphate nutrients), loves the stuff, so it's not going to waste.

The 19:00 - 7:00 12-hour nightwatch is definitely taking its toll on us. Meal times are 7:30, 11:30 and 17:00, very inconveniently when we're not up, unless we want to have breakfast for a very late dinner or dinner for an early breakfast. I bought nutrition bars from Costco for the trip, but I'm currently eating them at 2/day which means I'll run out before the trip is over. Hopefully for the second leg we can switch the CTD watches around so we can all have at least two meals, and all get to work at least some time during daylight hours.

Second CTD Watch, or, Nighttime in the Northern Realm of the Polar Bear

2009-10-09T03:30:55Z

I slept through most of the second day of mooring work, except for the surprise fire drill at 10:30 that was actually a small fire in a crewmember's cabin. An upper deck got smoky, but then the fire alarm system got a malfunction in it somewhere, and short, hesitant smoke alarms went off at random hours throughout the day, guaranteeing that those of us on night watch got a miserable days' worth of sleep. Not that the daywatch had much fun either -- they had to spend most of the day "dragging" for a mooring that didn't feel like behaving well. The last mooring of the day, pictured above, popped up pretty quickly and was up on deck while there was still plenty of light.

8-9 Oct 2009: Second night of CTD watch. The wind picked up this evening and we got some wave action going -- even had to break out the mops when we got splashed before the doors to the main lab were dogged (sealed tightly). It's nowhere near bad enough to stop CTDs, though, but I should mention that the hard hats and life jackets are the norm on this ship. By 01:30, the wind died down and we got some snow flurries, which after 3 days I'm beginning to believe is standard "balmy" weather here. When I'm on deck in that balmy weather to tend the CTD (pictured here), I'm wearing a base layer of smart wool under jeans, a smart-wool mid-layer, a t-shirt, a super-thick Icelandic sweater, orange foul-weather gear inherited from a previous grad student that is huge on me, an adult size small PFD t(I slip right out of anything bigger), and my trusty hard-hat on top of my smartwool toque. Yes, merino wool is my absolute favorite material when I know I'm going to get wet in the wind and cold.

Tomorrow should be the same as today. Eventually we'll run out of moorings, and when we do, we'll run CTDs 24/7 on a line from Disko Bay to the southwest. Maybe I'll switch to daywatch, so I can have breakfast and breakfasttime and dinner at dinnertime instead of vice-versa.

Picking up moorings

2009-10-07T13:54:24Z

Photo: Dawn over mooring floats, taken while leaving the harbor at Nuuk, Greenland.

My adviser maintains an array of moorings across the Davis Strait, measuring water temperature, salinity, and currents. Once a year his lab reserves time on WHOI's R/V Knorr to collect the data off the moorings, clean 'em up, put new batteries in 'em, and redeploy them. When we're not "popping" moorings (triggering an accoustic release at the base of the mooring that detaches the mooring from its anchor so the floats that keep it vertical can grad it all up to the surface) or retrieving them, we're running CTDs and collecting water samples for oxygen and nutrients, which can serve as proxies for biological activity in the water.

On the first day of the cruise (6 Oct), we spent all day steaming along the western coast of Greenland, up to the line of moorings. I was asleep when we crossed the Arctic Circle (a/k/a the Northern Domain of the Polar Bear). at 03:30 on the morning of 7 Oct, we started the first CTD cast and worked in the dark and light snow until after breakfast, when it was finally light enough to start recovering moorings. Now that it's lunchtime, I've got to go catch a few Zzzs so I can be back on deck at 19:00 to start CTD work again.

October 3rd. First full day in Nuuk.

2009-10-03T23:51:32Z

One you have arrived on site after however many endless hours of travel, you quickly find that days of the week lose meaning and dates mean more. Today was the 3rd of October -- I don't know whether it was saturday or sunday, but it was a good day's worth of work on the ship assembling gear and getting settled in to the main lab space on the R/V Knorr. In the evening we were free to get dinner in the city (my friend and I got pizza in a small pizza shop / espresso shop / casino / karaoke bar called Prego, then hung out in the hotel's fifth floor lounge to watch the moon rise from behind the mountains. Tomorrow is the 4th, and the plan is that we will muster in the lobby at oh-8-hundred to check out and move onto the boat. There will no doubt be more gear to assemble, document and test, enough to fill the 5th and the 6th as well, when the field cruise will officially start.

In the lounge, a Greenlandic (not "Greenlander" as I said before coming to Greenland) tried to sell my friend and I a soapstone carving of a walrus, but he didn't speak any english and we don't speak any of the Greenlandic dialects, so it was fairly easy to avoid any discussion of the possibility of us buying such a piece. Nor did I have to explain how I already happen to have a carving of a walrus. Had it been a carving of a Nuuk raven, I might have forgotten my budget and given in. I did try one of the locally-brewed beers, an unfiltered amber of some sort called "self-government" in honor of Greenland's recent promotion, and I think a little self-government is well worth the 31 kronur (Danish crowns). I say this having no idea what the exchange rate is, and unwilling to spend any of my dearly-bought internet minutes on finding out.

Regarding the weather and the dream of a tidy little Scandinavian cabin: I am practically living in smartwool 24/7, but for all that it's cold here, it's also dry and sunny. Partly owing to the recent switch to self-governance, Greenland's capital (Nuuk, population ~14,000) is undergoing a construction boom and something of a real-estate bubble, so though I could be tempted to buy a cheerily-painted board-and-batten pointy-roofed house to see if I could stick it out through a real Greenlandic winter, I doubt my Ballard condo would make a sufficient trade.

4 hours left!

2009-10-01T06:32:25Z

I ended up packing a dissolved oxygen sensor, cables, hose clamps, and logs from previous Davis Strait experiments in my luggage to be checked tomorrow -- the sensor on the ship's CTD broke, and the manufacturer is over in Bellevue, so the quickest and most reliable way to get it to the ship is to have the grad student bring it. Unfortunately, this means that I'm bringing the maximum allowed baggage, and I'm sure I'll be paying extra for it.

I'm not really looking forward to the Seattle->D.C.->Copenhagen-> K?? -> Nuuk series of flights, but I am looking forward to being rocked to sleep whenever I'm lucky enough to catch a few hours of Zzzs in just a couple more days. I'll be on the Knorr, the same ship I was on for the North Atlantic Spring Bloom 2008 experiment.

Packing the Can

2009-09-29T04:54:13Z

Today was the beginning of the packing of "The Can" for the Davis Strait project.

"The Can" is slang for the shipping container that will eventually get all our gear to the ship. Observational oceanography involves a lot of loading and unloading.

I came to work dressed up for dinner with a physicist/fellow-grad-student, but changed into the grubbies I keep in my office for just such an occasion. Of course, since I was prepared, I didn't end up doing anything that might get grease or some other impossible-to-launder substance on my clothes... Instead, I had to wrestle some nasty custom Windows code onto the Toughbook (it runs Windows XP, can handle Arctic weather, and is designed to shut down all networking capabilities at the touch of a very physical button) so I could then calibrate the compass in an ADCP... which was a simple console app tucked inside a generic MFC windows app so poorly-written I would've failed the kids who wrote it. In the end, we used a bare terminal to talk directly to the compass and relied on the compass manufacturer's website for guidance as to what to expect -- and I could have done that on my nice little MacBook. The rest of the day was endless trips up and down the stairs to grab this piece of gear or that sheet of neoprene or cut big chunks of foam into spacers for the batteries that power the moorings we were building today, and then fitting these huge, unwieldy batteries into their cages, and me with my streched tendon sheath all ibuprofen'd up being reminded that if I happen to drop one of the batteries, the protocol was to evacuate the building.

Silly giant lithium batteries.

By 5, I'd done everything an untrained lab tech could be trusted to do. I'm downright exhausted, and disappointed that I didn't get to fire up Matlab at all, which meant that I spent no time on my own research. Thank goodness we have a three-day weekend, because I've got so much work to do!

what NAO?

2009-05-04T20:58:52Z

No, I don't mean NAO in the sense of the LOLCAT term; it stands for North Atlantic Oscillation, which is a measure of the strength or intensity of the pressure difference between southern Iceland and the Azores. It's a pressure index, useful for determining how much the variability of different processes in the ocean are related to variability in the atmosphere. (I'm sure an atmospheric scientist would have a considerably different description for the usefulness of the NAO, one that probably doesn't mention the ocean much, if at all.)

The state of the NAO may affect how water masses in the northern North Atlantic -- say, around the site of the North Atlantic Spring Bloom 2008 experiment which is the subject of my master's thesis -- are "squished" or move around. Is water from the Irminger Basin or Labrador Sea more likely to snake around the Reykjanes ridge into the Icelandic basin when the NAO is low (or high)?

So far, the only place I've seen as a source for 2008 NAO data is this one web page and as strange as it may sound, I feel pretty lame about using something that I have to copy and paste, not that FTPing a text file with the same information in it is that much different or more official. It's just... yeah.

Scholarship for UW Oceanography / Fisheries students

2009-04-23T23:23:00Z

CLARENCE H. CAMPBELL ENDOWED LAUREN DONALDSON SCHOLARSHIP
ANNOUNCEMENT OF AVAILABILITY FOR ELIGIBLE STUDENTS

The College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences is pleased to announce
the availability of up to four student scholarships for the 2009-2010
academic year, made possible by the generosity of Clarence H. Campbell in
memory of Lauren "Doc" Donaldson.

Professor Lauren "Doc" Donaldson earned his MS and PhD degrees from the
University of Washington in 1931. He served on the faculty of the
School of Fisheries from 1932 until his retirement in 1973. Doc was
a world-renowned expert in development of fish stocks, and trained
countless students in freshwater fisheries research and management.
Clarence Campbell, '30, established this fund to recognize Doc's lasting
influence.

These scholarships are available to any student pursuing a degree in the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences in the next academic year. Students must be enrolled as undergraduate majors or as graduate students in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences or the School of Oceanography to receive a scholarship. Previous recipients may re-apply. Award decisions will be based upon academic merit and financial need.

Award amounts will be the equivalent of one-year (three quarters) of
resident tuition for either graduate or undergraduate students
paid directly to the recipient's student account.

To apply, submit the following to the Office of the Dean no later than
Friday, May 15:
* Statement addressing (2 pages maximum):
o Academic and professional goals
o Circumstances creating financial need and impact of the
scholarship
o Any other experiences that have influenced your academic
path
* Current resume or curriculum vitae
* Unofficial UW transcript
* Sealed letter of recommendation from a faculty member or other
person familiar with your academic work

danger for the earth-observing satellites

2009-04-15T22:08:11Z

Bits of interest for hard-science environmental nerds in this week's Nature:

Remember when the Irridium satellite got whacked back in February? The debris from the collision is making a pretty ring around Earth (why should Saturn and Jupiter get all the bling, eh?), and it's endangering the ESA earth-observing satellites ERS-2 and Envisat -- oh, and by the way, Envisat is the one that almost does what NASA's carbon-observing satellite was going to do. Speaking of which, NASA is trying to figure out if it can fund a replacement and if so, would it be an exact replica deployed in 2011, or a better version deployed in 2015?

Needs more iron?

2009-01-29T00:43:34Z

The idea behind Oceanic iron-fertilization experiments is fairly simple: phytoplankton need nutirents in specific ratios, so their growth is limited by whichever nutrient set the smallest ratio size (ie, the ominous-sounding Law of the Minimum). Often, this limiting nutrient is iron, so if you distribute iron in some patch of the ocean, you will stimulate a phytoplankton bloom, and can then study all sorts of things biological oceanographers wonder about. The idea behind oceanic iron-fertilization to mitigate global climate change takes it just a little further by making an assumption: if you fee the ocean iron, the phytoplankton flourish; and while they're busy growing and dividing and growing some more, they're taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converting it into biomass, which then sinks out of the surface water when it gets too big/old/eaten by zooplankton and excreted/etc..

It's important to note that these two things are very different: scientific experiments that use iron fertilization as a tool to study biological oceanography are not the same as attempts at sequestering carbon using iron fertilization. Recently a call went out on the OCB-all email list (ocean color & biogeochemistry) for scientists to help explain to the Ministry of Education and Science (and the public) what this difference is, because the research vessel was being delayed by various environmental groups. The irony of course is that they were interfering with the very scientific research that is required to determine whether iron fertilization done on a large scale is feasible, effective at sequestering carbon, or likely to have negative environmental impact. If you're going to demand that an environmental risk assessment be done, shouldn't you let the assessors do their job?

Mentioning the 2004-5 CROZEX study and this year's contested LOHAFEX Indo-German experiment is a quick newsbit in Nature: Ocean fertilization: dead in the water? (Starts at the bottom of the first page).

Out of a Hundred, or, The Score

2009-01-24T03:55:19Z

I am getting (just barely!) half points on my math homework.

This is not at all surprising. Honestly, I'm happy if I get any points at all!

The other students in the class, the EEs and the stats grad students, are not doing nearly as poorly. But then, they ought to be getting all of this easily -- it's their field, for crying out loud, which they've been studying for 2 or 3 or 5 years already. For me, it's like taking geology in French: déchets des mines, réseau hydrographique, vitesse de décantation and effondrement. Except it's "autocovariance sequence," "spectral representation," "stochastically continuous," and "autoregressive process." We just started the chapter on filters, and I feel much better now that we're stepping away from statistics and towards physics just a little bit. Unfortunately, the professor referred to the plot that was projected today that most closely resembles some of the work I have to do as "basically a wavelet" -- which is a whole 'nother class.

After this one, will the professor even let me take another?

...

My other big task this quarter is TAing an undergraduate class. It's threatening to fill every spare moment of my week, and I'm trying to figure out how to get some of my time back. They have a midterm this coming week, which means I'll be doing twice as much grading next weekend -- but I'm still very, very happy that I don't have to do a lab this coming week. I'll be able to spend my wednesday doing my math homework instead, and on thursday I'll be able to have lunch before office hours.

Hello 2K9

2009-01-03T05:41:58Z

Here's an understatement: 2008 was a busy year.

The NAB 2008 experiment ran from the beginning of April to the beginning of July. In addition to everything involved with the preparation, execution, and the start of the long process of data analysis, I survived the Mixing class better than I expected. I still have some work to finish for the AMATH class, which I punted in favor of the American Geophysical Union fall meeting. The workup to AGU coincided with finals week -- I lost track of when weeks started, since I worked to one deadline after another without regard for weekends, and things like mondays got lost along the way.

I don't recommend this approach for long, but it does work in a pinch.

Winter quarter 2009 has me TAing, taking a class I'm completely unprepared for, taking a class I don't have any time for, and... oh, right... there are the usual New Years Resolutions. You probably are familiar with the one I'm talking about: work/life balance. For me that's working out regularly, practicing my fiddle, and setting aside some time every day for writing. My super-secret project last year was writing a novel during nanowrimo; from now until november I'll be working on the revision. I'd like to slip language study in there, too, but there's only so much time -- lame, huh?

Today is the last day of my vacation. I didn't Get Out Of Dodge like I wanted to, but I did get all my electronic waste disposed of appropriately (resolution #2), I got all the paperwork I ignored for the past 3 months organized and dealt with (resolution #3), and I got my hair colored with my favorite color (resolution #5), woot! Now it's time to get back into gear, and deal with resolutions 1, 4, and 6-10.

Important things

2008-10-16T16:53:46Z

My relative silence here is a direct result of the nature of this quarter -- now that I'm (almost technically) a third-year graduate student, I'm being pulled in several directions at the same time that I should be settling down for the long haul. First, I have that lovely dataset I spent last year acquiring for my master's and PhD work, which I need to somehow find more than one day a week to work on. Then, I have a great physical oceanography class on Mixing and Turbulence in the ocean, which is honestly kicking my ass. (I keep reminding myself that Feyman famously stopped working on the turbulence problem because it was too hard.) There's an applied math class that meets at 8:30 in the morning that I'm not terrifically thrilled about, although the class is, of course, very useful. Add to that some seminars and public lectures where my attendance has been less than I would like.

Then there's outreach (Ocean Inquiry Project) and volunteering (Seattle Girls School mentoring, KEXP pledge drives, beach clean-ups with Seattle Surfriders), daily workouts, and attempting to build a social life...

So, what's important? There's a big ol' election coming up, and that's pretty damn important. For me, the most important issues at the federal level are the ones to have lasting effects -- selecting supreme court justices affects the future direction of American law, (see Marbury v. Madison (1803)). I'm less likely to get worked up over policies that run 4 or maybe 8 years; I feel comfortable with short-term variability. [Caveat: actually, I'm having a tough time wrapping my head around the work Kolmogorov did with the inertial range of turbulence, which lives in that short-term variability world...]

But there are long-term trends which can be seriously affected by policies set up in one administration; and from here, I can't tell which ones are going to suffer or benefit the most from one candidate or another, but why risk a bad outcome on an issue that is important?

Science funding is important. Although the republican campaign relies heavily on the ideal of an innovative, technologically advanced American Worker, McCain has trivilized science and science funding in at least two of the debates. First was the crack he made about "$3 million to study the DNA of bears" (scroll down to that heading here), which is not a terrible price for a basic research project, and the second was characterizing the Adler Planetarium's Sky Theater as an "overhead projector" (more commentary here). In politics, though, there is a difference between what you say when you're pandering to the crowd, and what you do when it comes to making policy. Nature magazine has a collection of election-related pieces, including a set of 18 science-related questions given to the candidates (only Obama replied). ScienceDebate2008.com sent 14 science questions, and posted the replies from both candidates on their website.

Fostering girls and young women in science is important, too. AWIS and SWE presented questions to the Obama and McCain campaigns, and posted the responses [pdf].

... I can't wait for my ballot to arrive in the mail ...

Getting your goat

2008-09-21T17:54:48Z

The UW's Program on Climate Change Summer Institute was held at Friday Harbor Labs from sunday through wednesday. On thursday, I took a break, and hopped in the Prius for a drive down to Chehalis with a friend to pick up the latest addition to her farm -- this adorable 4-month old French Alpine goat. My hatchback became an impromptu goat pen for ~3 hours, with the very necessary addition of a tarp under all the towels. This is the first goat I ever picked up (to put in the back of my car) and figured out how to lead away from its mother, so I'm attached to it of course. It's the cutest goat in the world!

That evening I received a mailing from Heifer International, which included a bit about how the gift of goats & training in goat breeding and care are helping two gypsy communities in Romania. It's amazing that something so basic as a handful of livestock can make such a positive change in the world. (Then again, there are a lot of city folk who would benefit from spending quality time with the animals that provide their food and clothing.)

One of the presenters at the conference was arguing that being in science, especially working in climate science, is not the way to change the world for the better, and the only real way to "make a difference" is through direct action. Well and good, but there must be knowledge to make action effective -- and besides, one can both pursue science and make direct, local, substantive contributions to benefit society, whether it's picking up trash from your local beach or community park, donating money to effective charitable organizations, or fetching goats in gas-sippers.

Ike Arrives

2008-09-13T16:35:39Z

Got the link from Fark.com: raw footage from Houston news source khou.com showing waves topping the seawall in Galveston early saturday morning.

The wave action starts around 5 minutes in, and there's some really great "churning" at 11:20.

I should add that the first time I came across the term "disaster porn" was in a Pat Cadigan novel, so I feel compelled to state for the record that I don't usually seek this sort of coverage out. My childhood home got pretty seriously flooded this summer, so I do understand the human impact of weather; but it is true that we choose to live in areas that are prone to this sort of thing for good reasons and it is a tribute to our engineering that we can and sometimes do build structures that can take episodic poundings like this.

And wow! Check out those waves and think about the amount of energy they're carrying to the shore.

UW AUVs and R/V Thomas G. Thompson

2008-08-14T17:38:53Z

Here's an NSF news item starring the new AUV "sentry" deployed from the Thompson (the joint UW/NOAA global-class research vessel berthed here at UW). It's part of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, which ties in to UW's NEPTUNE project [IEEE article, UW news item].

OK, so it's not a Seaglider, and it looks more like a fish you'd find in a coral reef than our "dolphin"-like gliders, but it's still great to see that this high-profile project is off to a good start.

Antarctic fossils and rapid climate change

2008-08-07T18:54:41Z

The PCC Summer Institute is coming, and the grad students who are attending are busy reading and discussing papers related to this summer's theme: "How Does Ocean Circulation Matter for Climate Change?"

I found an article today that I'd love to read -- "An abrupt wind shift in western Europe at the onset of the Younger Dryas cold period" -- if only Nature hadn't created a new journal ("Geoscience") and placed it there. This is a problem because my library doesn't have a subscription, so I can only read the abstract and not the article. Ah, Nature -- once again forcing people who are already subscribers to pay more.

And then I found this in the National Science Foundation's daily digest:

National Science Foundation-funded scientists working in an ice-free region of Antarctica have discovered the last traces of tundra--in the form of fossilized plants and insects--on the interior of the southernmost continent before temperatures began a relentless drop millions of years ago.

An abrupt and dramatic climate cooling of 8 degrees Celsius, over a relatively brief period of geological time roughly 14 million years ago, forced the extinction of tundra plants and insects and tranformed the interior of Antarctica into a perpetual deep-freeze from which it has never emerged.

[...]

Part of the study in the Dry Valleys is captured in the documentary "Ice People," by Emmy-award winning director Anne Aghion. NSF's Antarctic Artists and Writers program supported Aghion in the field for four months in 2006 to document the work of scientists there. The film is being released to coincide with the International Polar Year 2007-2009 (IPY), a global scientific deployment, and is scheduled to air on the Sundance Channel in 2009.

OK, so there is some good stuff to be found on TV.