Almost there!

Bags are packed, rides to the Denver airport are arranged (our flight leaves at 6:30am...) and copious amounts of in-flight reading material has been acquired.

If you haven't been following the state of the MJO, here's a figure to get you up to speed.

This is a popular way to visualize the state of the MJO. It make look really complicated at first, (and in some ways it is) but the interpretation is simple. Basically, as time progresses the line goes counter-clockwise around the diagram, representing eastward propagation of MJO-like patterns. When the line is outside the gray circle in the center we can say an MJO event is occurring. The farther outside the circle, the stronger the MJO event. 

As you can see in the bottom-left portion of the plot we recently had a very large MJO event last month, although it was very short lived. The part of the diagram where this occurred is right over the DYNAMO sounding array, so its just the sort of thing we're looking for! Hopefully we'll see another strong MJO while Steph and I are on Diego Garcia. The forecast (colored lines in the figure below) looks somewhat promising, but I generally don't put much faith in MJO forecasts...

There are some drawbacks to this method of tracking the MJO. I have personally tried a few alternate methods of calculating this index with little success. One of the big issues with tracking the MJO is that it only exist on specific space and time scales, so to isolate the signal you need to find some way of ignoring everything else, including storms that occur every few days and larger scale features like ENSO (El Niño). This makes creating a real-time index very difficult.

Our friend Adam, James and Gavin just got back from Diego Garcia and gave us a treasure map to find something they hid on the island! I'm hoping it's gold bullion.

Add this to the ample time we'll have to snorkel and windsurf I think we'll be able to occupy ourselves while on the island. I've also got plenty of research to work on while I'm sitting in the crate waiting for the weather ballon to pop. I recently found this newsletter that lists some day-to-day happenings ont he island including a scrabble tournament, a golf tournament, a 5k run and a boating class!

Here we go!