Semper Fi to the max!

I had an odd encounter with the military the other day. Heather and I went to have dinner at one of the many eateries here on Diego Garcia called the Chief Petty Officer's (CPO) club. Every place here has the same menu, which is a little odd but it makes more sense in the context of this story. After we ordered our food we were approached by a US military guy who seemed really friendly at first. He hadn't seen us before so he inquired about what we were doing. After chatting about weather balloons he asked us who we were working for and what our "GS" level was. After telling him that we had a temporary DOD contract he proceeded to tell us that we were not allowed in the CPO and we needed to finish our drinks and leave.

Since the military personel here tend to joke around a lot we figured he was kidding, but after he awkwardly stormed out of the bar we asked some of the other diners there, who were all higher up in the military, and they told us that he was "technically" correct. It turns out that some bars are named after the rank or branch that is allowed to eat there during normal business hours, which partly explains why they all serve the same food. The idea is that people can BS and gripe about their bosses or vice versa without worrying about who is overhearing what.

After talking with some more people about the incident it seems that these rules are routinely ignored, especially with civillians, and this guy was way out of line confronting us the way he did. Our contracts also don't mention anything about being restricted from any part of the island that is not "secured". This gets added to a growing list of quirky rules and laws enforced here by the US military and the British government.


In other news, I finally got a chance to go out and check out one of the clubs on a weekend night. Heather is friends with a bunch of british guys who like to drink at the appropriately named "The Brit Club". Here's a picture of that crew.

There's a filipino guy there who sells some kind of BBQ meat on a stick. Not sure what it is, but its good. I didn't actually stay very long since I was pretty tired form a long shift at the sounding site, but I was able to witness a Brit Club tradition where a guy will get up on the bar and drink an entire bottle of baileys out of a leather boot. Not only does it sound disgusting, the look of the guy trying to put down a boot full of curdling liquor was painful to watch. I found an interesting NPR article about Diego Garcia from 2001 that mentions the island is known for nudity and cross dressing! I can honestly say from what I've heard and what I saw the other night at the Brit Club, everything in the article is STILL ACCURATE!!!

The fitness center here is really exceptional. The massages are only $15! Steph and I tried out the aqua massage machines. I had never seen or heard of these before, but apparently them have them in malls in the US? It was interesting, not as good as a real massage though.

Alright enough of that, lets talk about the weather.

The skies have been overcast the past few days, presumably because of the current MJO activity! the rains have steadily increased in frequency, but I haven't noticed any really strong downpours. For awhile now I've thought the MJO tended to form off the equator, but the current situation doesn't jive with that notion very well when we take a look at the OLR anomaly from the last week.

OLR stands for "Outgoing Longwave Radiation" and is used a lot as an approximation for convection and precipitation. However, picture is likely skewed by the existence of a tropical storm that occurred north of the equator. Adam Sobel posted about the unfortunate death of some fisherman in Sri Lanka due to negligence by the forecast office there.

If we instead look at the low-level winds we see that the westerly winds associated with this MJO event are sitting south of the equator like you would expect. So maybe my understanding is still valid.

Here's the current phase space plot of the RMM index from Matt Wheelers site. This is turning out to be a really great event for DYNAMO!

Most of the models forecasted that this event would die out quickly after it started. I can't help but think that this is related to something Dave Raymond found in a paper of his with Zeljka Fuchs. They showed the GFS forecast model in particular systematically damps out a special type of instability thought to be central to the existence of the MJO. Doing hindcast experiments with the data we're collecting right now will be really interesting in this context.