Thursday, December 1, 2011

The Good Life

Stephanie's snorkel fail:



I'm in a great mood today! I found out this morning that we're going to only be doing 4 weather balloons a day from here on out! I'm pretty excited about this for a few reasons.
  1. I'll be able to get way more (and more regular) sleep
    • Having to stay till 4 am every other day was hard to cope with
  2. I'll be able to hang out at the bars when other people are there
    • Until now we've either worked until 10:30 or had to leave for our shift around 10:30, so every time there was an event we would either be tired from a shift or have to leave before it got going.
  3. We'll get more time off in between shifts to explore the island, snorkel, windsurf, go fishing, etc.
  4. I'll be able to focus on my research for a poster that I need to finish for a meeting in January.


We went snorkeling today and it turned out to be the best visibility we've had. We found some tugboat wreckage and I got some video of a sea turtle. I thought it was a rock at first until it started moving./ The visibility still wasn't that great, but I posted the video on Facebook if you're interested.
The end of this special observing period is happening mostly because we are limited on resources (i.e. helium), but we also captured the initiation of an MJO event, which is exactly what we came to do! The MJO is still very active (we're at the end of the blue line on the plot to the left), and we'll still be collecting data into January that will be very useful. The data we've collected so far is going to make for some great hind-cast experiments, as well as testing a cumulus cloud scheme that I'm developing. 

The wet phase of the MJO  was manifested here on DG as overcast skies and lots of light rain so there wasn't any opportunities to take any cloud pictures, but as the convective signal of the MJO moves over towards indonesia we should be seeing much clearer weather where we'll be able to see individual storms at a distance.


I really love coconut, and there's tons of them here just lying around! However, I need a machete to get at one, and the only people that have those are the filipinos. However, I was hungry and bored the other day and so I armed myself with the best tools I could find laying around and did my best to disassemble and devour an unsuspecting coconut. It took me about 45 minutes, but I was successful, and it was delicious! Here's some pictures to document the endeavor.

Best tools I could find for the job
The victim
Getting warmed up
I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!

The sweet nectar of victory
I could really use a spoon here
The aftermath. 

Coconut carnage! One coconut was SEVERELY harmed during the filming of this blog post.

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