Tuesday, November 8, 2011

It's a Blog!

Time to light up a cigar as we welcome my new baby blog into the world!

The main purpose of this blog is document three things:
  1. Climate research
  2. My travels to Asia (for DYNAMO)
  3. Food
There's a good chance some of my other interests will creep in from time to time, but I'll try my best to keep things restricted to travel, research and food. I won't try to hide the fact that my foodie ramblings are out of place in a blog mostly about atmospheric science, but since I'll also be talking about travelling in general it seems natural to highlight the gastronomical experiences.


First thing's first, what is this DYNAMO I speak of???


DYNAMO is a field campaign to study the dynamics of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO). A very good and thorough description of the MJO and DYNAMO can be found at a blog maintained by my advisor Eric Maloney and colleagues at The Madden Julian Conversation. But just in case you're in a rush, here's the shortest definition I could come up with:

  • the MJO describes a variation in atmospheric circulation and convection over the Indian Ocean and West Pacific region that reoccurs every 50 days (roughly), or on sub-seasonal or intraseasonal timescales. An MJO event can generally be though of as a area of enhanced convection that starts in the western Indian Ocean and moves eastward until becoming incoherent around the dateline. 
The MJO is a very interesting phenomenon because it has the potential to help us improve weather and climate forecasts if we can accurately reproduce it in atmospheric models. The problem is that there is a lot about the MJO that we don't understand. Its not clear whether DYNAMO will able to fill in all the gaps in what we know, but there's a good chance we will learn valuable information for future experiments.

The part of DYNAMO that I'll be helping with is to launch weather balloons from a tiny island in the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia, which is a British Territory. Diego Garcia is home to a US military base called Camp Justice. Gavin di an interesting post on the history of the island and how the local inhabitants were pretty brutally removed from the island to establish the military presence. The legal battles from this are still happening to this day as I understand. The island has been used as a launch point for previous conflicts in the middle east and recently there has been indications that the island may be used again for a potential conflict with Iran. Hopefully things won't come to that.


I want to thank my fellow CSU grad students Adam, Gavin and James who helped me come up with a name for this blog and who also have a blog about their trip to Diego Garcia during DYNAMO, which can be found at Sans Continent. The phrase "take it with a grain of salt" comes to us from Pliny the Elder who suggested that any ill effects of ingesting something (in his case it was poison) can be lessened by taking it with a bit of salt. The modern use usually refers to accepting a statement while maintaining a healthy skepticism about it's validity. Since I think of myself as a skeptic in the sense that absolute knowledge is unattainable, similar to how travelling at the speed of light is impossible, I thought their title suggestion was a pretty good one.


While in Diego Garcia I'll be working with Stephanie Slade, who is another student in Eric Maloney's research group. We depart for Asia on Nov. 19th, which is coming up fast! So I'll leave you with a couple maps to give you an idea where Diego Garcia actually is.




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