My Entangled States

Sunrise, Sunset

Wed, 14 May 2008 01:31:23 GMT

Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.

Ah, nothing like being on the North Atlantic, right? Cold, dreary, gray seas and storm after storm... we had our two little storms, and for the past week and a half the weather has been absolutely lovely. I'm CTD chief during the middle watch, midnight to 4, so it's not too hard for me to see both sunset and sunrise every day.

Ivona asked for more pics, so here they are! I'll try to find some with people in them later.

CTD Hookers

Tue, 13 May 2008 17:54:17 GMT

Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.

It sounds terrible, I know. Instead of saying "I've been trained to be a CTD hooker," how about "I've been trained to work the CTD taglines." The CTD is the big cage w/ niskin bottles that are open when lowered into the water, and closed at specific depths on the way back up. On the Knorr, there's an extendable boom that's used to put the CTD well away from the side of the ship before lowering or raising it, and that's why we need to have taglines -- ropes with self-closing hooks on the end that we attach to the sides of the CTD cage using long, heavy poles.

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Collaboration

Sun, 11 May 2008 13:31:44 GMT

Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.

Patrick Martin, Richard Lampitt's graduate student, brought a couple 30L bottles, a CT and a weight to attach to a wire for a do-it-yourself CTD cast down to 1000m. Fortunately, there was some left over water at the ~1000m depth, which Alba Gonzalez-Posada is kindly doing duplicate oxygen titrations on, so I will have a number to help calibrate the two types of oxygen sensors on the gliders -- assuming the deep water masses are fairly similar (Labrador Seawater, presumably). That assumption may or may not bear out, but the temperature-salinity characteristics should answer that question.

Maybe the Ocean Next Time Around (life on ship)

Sun, 11 May 2008 12:51:31 GMT

Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.

I went shopping on our last day in Reykjavik. While everyone else wisely stocked up on chocolate, I bought myself two Icelandic wool sweaters and two CDs by Icelandic artists I'd never heard of before. Now our collaborators must suffer my fashion choices, because I wear one or the other sweater every single day -- the lab gets cold, especially when the optics people are out doing their special instrument tows and leave the main lab doors open.

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Float 47 Back on Board

Sat, 03 May 2008 13:58:15 GMT

Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.

13:50 UTC 3 May 2008: Eric and company (Patrick, Bosun... several people all bundled up so I still need to verify who all was out there handling lines) got Float 47 back on board without any hitches that I could see. Yay! Now we can head back to Float 48 and the gliders (and Checkley's float) to get started on the calibration casts and surveys.

Spotted Float 47!

Sat, 03 May 2008 13:19:26 GMT

Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.

It's 13:15 UTC, wind's picking up (34kt?), waves are maybe 10ft, and the bridge says they've got the float visually. Eric Rehm, Kyle the Bosun, Kevin (from Lampitt's group) are on deck to pick her up, and several others of the crew and science team are available for lending an extra hand or commentary, depending on how well it goes.

1st day loading

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:07:24 GMT

Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.

I went to bed as usual, around 0130, and woke up as usual, around 0645. I had fully expected to sleep until at least 0900, but... but there's a lot of light here, and a lot of work to do.

Fortunately, this delightful coffeeshop -- which my adviser exhorted me to visit during a chat session -- was on the way to the Knorr:

[inline:orange_bean.jpg=kaffitar]

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Reykjavik

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 18:01:17 GMT

Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.

I'm in Reykjavik now, finally showered and very caffeinated, waiting for everyone to muster in the lobby for dinner. Not that I'm hungry, but I do need to stay awake while the sun is up so I can be rested for tomorrow's work (loading the ship).

The hotel? It's like I died and went to IKEA. Everything is so crisp and simple and clean and adorable... and no matter what the beds are, they're going to be much better than the horrible airplane seat I tried to sleep in a mere 7 hours ago!

Glad to be here, and soon I get to get back to work!

Grooves for Gliding

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 07:46:21 GMT

Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.

I've been up pretty much every night past midnight, making sure the pod's in a good place for me to sleep through their next surfacing (or two). Lately I've been listening to KEXP.org via iTunes, and one of my favorite DJs (Riz!) has been doing the late night show. He often plays a sort of trippy ambient indie rock mix that is as good for piloting gliders in the wee hours as industrial/goth is good for coding in the wee hours...

The only problem is that when I hear a good song, I can buy it in a minute. Curse you, iTunes!

Data, data, every where, and hardly any time to look at it

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 02:16:18 GMT

Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.

The data has begun pouring in, and for some reason I volunteered to clean up and post the underway and CTD data from the deployment cruise. Don't I have gliders to be piloting right now? Yes, I do. But... I'm OCD enough with timestamps right now that I've not only transformed ascii files to matlab files, but I've also corrected the various day-rollover problems, so the timestamps are actually totally correct. Woot!

And they're in both UTC and local time! I'm really liking this whole working at 20 Degrees West thing, it certainly makes data-scrubbing a little easier.

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First Cross-post

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 16:34:58 GMT

Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.

In order to lessen the amount of time I spend blogging, while still letting me post journal entries, I am consolidating my project blog and my personal blog. (This should be fine, since my personal life now consists almost entirely of The Project, anyway.) This is accomplished by a drupal module called CrossPoster. Let's see if it works...

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Check-up on US ocean policy

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:47:09 GMT

The Joint Ocean Commission Initiative recently issued the 2007 U.S. Ocean Policy Report Card. Short answer: we got a C, up from last year's C-. No big surprise there: we're showing improvement, but there's plenty of room for more. Also keeping in line with other trends, most of the improvement has been seen at the state and regional level, like the Western Climate Initiative

Go Cascadia!

Noise is not the Signal

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:59:32 GMT

There's an opinion piece in the March issue of Physics Today entitled Is climate sensitive to solar variability? showing that a technique for complexity matching between statistics for solar flares and the 11-year modulation of the global temperature anomaly shows a high correlation between the two.

That modulation -- a fairly periodic signal, one up and one down roughly every 11 years -- is one of many inputs to the global temperature anomaly. When you take out all the periodic signals, you're left with an upward trend, which is the signal of global warming. The 11-year modulation is noise.

It is important to know where all the noise comes from -- all the better to understand the system and better force predictive models.

But the authors generalize their results to be proof that all "global warming" is due to the noise. And that's where the problem lies: in an effort to disprove global climate change, the authors take a valid and interesting scientific result and misconstrue it, to the detriment of us all.

Mr. Sunday School

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 06:10:44 GMT

When we're out testing the seagliders in Puget Sound -- which requires an awful lot of hanging around on the beach monitoring laptops while the gliders do their pre-launch procedures -- we often get approached by people. Usually it's families with young children and senior citizens out for a stroll, and they generally understand that we're working and appreciate the time we take to answer their questions about the "underwater robots," Puget Sound, and oceanography in general.

Usually.

Today we had a drunk come up and stare at the glider, his beer bottle momentarily forgotten in his hand. That wasn't a problem -- I told him it was a robot we used to monitor the ocean and asked him if he had any questions, and I suspect the whole difficulty of maintaining a conversation in that state was too much for him to stand, so he wandered off with a brief "wow."

It was Mr. Sunday School who was the problem. A guy who kept bothering us with questions about what we were doing, and wanting to lecture us on how "it's all a miracle" and "someone oughta tell Al Gore" and "God made the plants, you know, because there's a reason for everything, I mean, why else are they just out there in the middle of the ocean?" It's an awkward situation, because as a representative of the university and the lab, I don't want to just completely blow this guy off, and as a scientist, I have a duty to share what I know with the community at large. I'm also well aware that not all scientists are atheists, and it would be incorrect of me to tell someone "I'm a scientist, therefore I don't agree with your strict biblical world view."

However, I am a scientist... and I can't help but notice the people who say "Nature is a marvel of God" are often also the ones who also say "He had a reason for making it this way, so we don't have to do anything or learn anything about it, and it's all going to be OK because He Said So." Faith is no excuse for ignorance.

So there he was, getting in the way -- and unlike the drunk, Mr. Sunday School didn't take the hint. I ended up doing what you do with any troll: after polite chatting for 5 minutes, I turned around and got back to work. The midwestern in me is all like "that's so ruuuude!" and the rest of me is all "nowhere near as rude as he was being to us."

I heart Wikipedia

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:04:27 GMT

Even though there are vast swaths of the internet-using world that thinks the internet was made for shopping, shopping and shopping, I know it was made for the quick and efficient dissemination of knowledge.

Here I am in grad school, and when my textbooks and lecture notes fail me, I go to wikipedia. Thank you Wikipedia, you're my hero!

waiting for the mastodons that will never come

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:40:20 GMT

Paleoecologists can be so poetic! This morning on the bus I was catching up w/ my NPR podcasts, and I particularly enjoyed the segment about the honey locust trees in Manhattan with their incredible spikes. It's a good bit of coffee-break science.

Greenland Summer and the Rise of the Seas

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:46:30 GMT

For folks in Seattle, there's a good couple of talks coming up at the Pacific Science Center:

Dr. Konrad Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), will give two lectures on March 5th and 6th on sea level rise. Dr. Steffen's lecture is part of the first annual
JISAO lecture series titled "Climate Change: A Wake Up Call"

Sea Level Rise and Ice Sheets
Wednesday, March 5, 2008, 7:30 - 8:30
Pacific Science Center, Eames IMAX Theatre
Admission to each Eames IMAX lecture is $5.00. Admission is FREE to Faculty, Staff and Students of the University of Washington, Pacific Science Center Members, and Town Hall Members.

Cryospheric Response to Climate Change
Thursday, March 6, 2008, 7:30 - 8:30
UW, Kane Hall, Room 210 (Admission FREE).

The skinny:
Air temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet have increased by 4 deg C since 1991. The ice sheet melt area increased by 30% for the western part between 1979-2006. The increasing trend in the total area of melting
bare ice is unmistakable at 13% per year, significant at a probability of 0.99. Hence, the bare ice region, the wet snow region, and the equilibrium line altitude have moved further inland and resulting in increased melt water flux towards the coast. Increase in ice velocity in the ablation region and the concurrent increase in melt water suggests that water penetrates to great depth through moulins and cracks, lubricating the bottom of the ice sheet. New insight was gained of subsurface hydrologic channels and cavities using new instrumentation and a video system during the melt peak in August 2007. These new results will be discussed in view of the rapid increase in melt area and mass loss of the Greenland ice sheet due to increasing air temperatures.

Oceans 21

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:27:53 GMT

No, it's not another movie -- it's proposed legislation (HR-21) that will make NOAA a "real" organization and unify management of our part of the oceans, to "ensure healthy ocean policy." I think they mean healthy policy and healthy oceans, but that's moving into political territory and outside my field.

A Beautiful Lie

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:20:12 GMT

Found this via Plenty Mag (online) today: a music video set in Greenland. The landscape -- icescape? -- is just breathtaking.

"deathfest on the sea floor"

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 06:49:54 GMT

Scientists fear tipping-point in Pacific Ocean -- specifically, that the deep waters off Washington and Oregon coasts have reached the point of anoxia, where there's no oxygen for the fishes to breathe. A press release covers it in a little more detail, and you can also check out the abstract at the Science site.

Wouldn't that be the perfect title for an industrial/goth song? If the industrial/goth band were made up of Oceanographers, I suppose...

PRISM Cruise 2008

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 05:07:42 GMT

I went on the first leg of the PRISM Winter '08 cruise this past week, over to Hood Canal and then up north to Admiralty Inlet. I pulled a 0630 - 2330 shift doing dissolved oxygen titrations (ie, Winklers) on the day we got gale-force winds. It finally felt like I was on a boat, and not just holed away in a lab. I snuck out a couple times to be on deck and tried to get photos of the choppy water, but none came out particularly well.

One of the wonderful things about being on a ship, especially when there's some wave action going on, is that the rocking makes me sleep so soundly when I finally make it to my berth. And it always sounds like there's an industrial band playing somewhere in the other lab nearby, so it's easy to concentrate on the sort of work I do.

This shot was taken on the first day of the cruise -- isn't the water just entrancing?

Focus the Nation!

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 06:14:05 GMT

In 2007 I made a resolution to volunteer at least once every season. I didn't bother making the resolution again this year, because I'm already mentoring at least twice a month and have volunteered at least once every season on top of that, anyway.

Thursday was the huge Focus the Nation event at UW, and I helped out by keeping the snacks table stocked, organizing questions for the big final panel event of the evening, and ushering / protecting the VIP reserved seats. My oceanography skillz did not get used, but my logistical and rather rough-hewn (ahem) personal skillz got honed a bit.

I was honestly worried that it wouldn't come off, but it did. The keynote talk was decently-well attended, and then the exhibit hall got packed around noon, and the afternoon panel discussions I saw were packed, and so was the evening town-hall meeting with Sims, Nickels and Rockefeller, moderated by Steve Scher of our local NPR station.

LuAnne Thompson (who did an amazing job pulling all this together) exhorted all the scientists in the crowd to go to the economics/policy/social-aspects talks, and all the social scientists to go to the hard-science talks. As a result, I found myself listening to four environmental economists (one of whom was a republican) talk as though everyone understood that a cap-and-trade-with-auction system is functionally the same as a carbon tax, but nonethelss far more appealing to our sensibilities. Progressives don't like the idea of a carbon tax because it would be regressive (hurts poor people the most) and conservatives don't like the idea of taxes at all. Also, conservatives would be more likely to consider making an effort to protect the environment if progressives didn't also say things like "increase public transportation" and "require better gas mileage," -- which the conservatives fear and don't believe are necessary. (That's a small problem to deal with, huh?) Then there was the panel of philosophers talking ethics, and policy folks talking policy, and a lone lawyer trying to let people know -- in his allotted 15 minutes -- that just writing a law isn't sufficient, that policy and infrastructure have to be in place to support and enforce the law.

( I was reminded of what I thought when I was a law student -- that the first year of law school should be taught to all Americans. I still think it's true.)

One of the policy people emphasized that the global climate change problem is a social problem, that the solution requires a fully-formed social movement, and that working to reduce CO2 emissions through the UN is inherently doomed to failure because a body that requires unanimous consensus can only adopt the least offensive measure that even the least enthusiastic member will agree to.

In the post-panel reception, I had a lovely chat with Dr. Arun Jhaveri, former mayor of Burien (and former APLer, UMass-Amherster, and physicist-turned-politician). I asked him for his take on why so many mass-transit issues have floundered in Seattle, and his answer was that as much as we in the Pacific Northwest love our environment, we are afraid to spend money, and we tend to fall in love with big one-solution-for-all-times sorts of projects that can't win in the political world because -- and this is a big because -- people need to be assured that the projects will be completed and usable. Projects that succeed are incremental, and become usable within 5 years, even if it's only the first stage.

So I learned stuff, too. More posts with links to come...

NSF Ocean Outreach

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 18:58:48 GMT

Here's a slick site for people interested in ocean sciences: NSF's COSEE Ocean Systems. It looks like it's still in the development stage -- not all of the features work, and there are a number of things that ought to be hot-linked, but aren't -- but it's an attractive layout and a neat idea.

International Year of Planet Earth

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 01:10:50 GMT

The journal of Nature has released a special supplement for the International Year of Planet Earth with free access online.

I recommend taking a gander at An early Cenozoic perspective on greenhouse warming and carbon-cycle dynamics. And if you have time, look at The rise of atmospheric oxygen.

professional websites for researchers

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:24:09 GMT

Last night I was having dinner at a local vegetarian Thai restaurant with some friends from different graduate programs, and the topic of professional and departmental web presences came up: exhibit a, a professor who won't set up a class webpage because it's too hard and time-consuming; exhibit b, the less-than-impressive physics department web page.

Then there's this website by an oceanographer and meteorologist at the Naval Research Lab, which is one of the best professional websites I've seen for an individual researcher. I honestly haven't run into that many people in the hard sciences who have a solid grasp of visual design and content presentation.

My Entangled States

Sunrise, Sunset

CTD Hookers

Collaboration

Maybe the Ocean Next Time Around (life on ship)

Float 47 Back on Board

Spotted Float 47!

1st day loading

Reykjavik

Grooves for Gliding

Data, data, every where, and hardly any time to look at it

First Cross-post

Check-up on US ocean policy

Noise is not the Signal

Mr. Sunday School

I *heart* Wikipedia

waiting for the mastodons that will never come

Greenland Summer and the Rise of the Seas

Oceans 21

A Beautiful Lie

"deathfest on the sea floor"

PRISM Cruise 2008

Focus the Nation!

NSF Ocean Outreach

International Year of Planet Earth

professional websites for researchers

I heart Wikipedia