It feels good to be back in New England. I dont need the air conditioner blasting, and I don’t have to put on sunscreen just to step outside for five minutes.
However the time has come to take the next step towards the real world. I’ve been pushing it away as much as I can, but I don’t think I can do it anymore. I only have one semester left here at Plymouth State University. I have been here for a very long time, and the thought of leaving this place is horrifying. I think this is why I am having a little bit of trouble getting back to my work.
The workload will be light, since I only have to take one class (Tropical Meteorology), but I just don’t feel motivated to do any work just yet. I hope this passes quickly, because before I know it October is going to come and I’ll be typing away at my thesis.
In order to bridge the gap between laziness and finishing up grad school, I worked on my resume today. I hope this will give me a jumpstart in motivation to do some meaningful work tomorrow (afterall, tomorrow will be the first day in my history at PSU where I don’t have a class OR have to work at all)
Check out the resume here. I added the stuff I did in Florida, and moved things around a bit. Let me know what you think. I enjoy constructive criticism.
After trying six times over the course of the past month. Space Shuttle Endeavour finally makes it into space. Even though it took a while, it was great to see it. Because of all the scrubs, and the wednesday launch, a lot of people weren’t present, which gave us the opportunity to see it over at the VAB, which is about 3 or 4 miles from the launch complex. It was nothing short of epic.
Well now that the launch is out of the way I’ll be able to focus more on my work. Speaking of that here is an update. Currently i have all my data (NCDC NSS files from 2003-2008) for most of the warm season convective events down here on the KSC / Cape Canaveral Station. So far the results do not look too great, although it does appear that the presence of hail does enhance these wind gusts. If only the polarimetric radar was working. Currently it is being calibrated and no data is being archived.
I only have 4 weeks left down here. And that will consist of a lot of work, including making some statistical forecasts, writing the data and methodology paper, and preparing for presentations to give down here. I also found out that I will be presenting on my own at the AMS Conference in Atlanta this January. Hopefully it turns out OK.
After a few days of traveling and getting things settled, I have finally found myself down in Cape Canaveral just a few miles south of the Kennedy Space Center. I’ll be spending the next 10 weeks doing research for the Convective Wind project. I just hope the sun won’t kill me down here. For pics of the place, go here.
Onto some weather related news. A gentelman over at Weather Graphics has provided a very extensive report of the weather conditions prior to and during the onset of crash. Thanks to my Florida roomate Mitch for showing me this.
You can view the report here
Hey guys Happy Hurricane Season (i know im a day off…oh well)
Well after two weeks of rest and re-arranging things up at School, it’s time to leave New England once again and head to a distant state. This time it’s down south to the sunny state of Florida. I will be working at Cape Canaveral and working on my thesis research. It’ll consist of using radar data (WSR-88D and hopefully polarimetric) to forecast for convective winds at the Kennedy Space Center Complex.
Hopefully by the end of the summer I’ll have much of my thesis written, and when I come back to New England I’ll be almost done with my masters. I will try my best to keep everyone updated on my work, whether it’s here or on my social networking sites.
Speaking of that, you can follow my trip to Florida over the next 48 hours by following me on my Twitter Account!
IT’S OVER!
The second semester of my graduate career is over! It feels pretty good to have one year of graduate school completed, and knowing that in one year I’ll receive my masters degree is both exciting and scary!
I have a couple of weeks to relax, move out of my apartment and prepare for my trip to Florida. I will be leaving for Florida on June 3rd and hope to be down there by June 4th. My first day at Cape Canaveral is June 8th, and that’s when I will begin my thesis research.
If any of you would like to see some of the work I have done, see the links below. I will be updating my website tomorrow to add these projects (and remove the weather lab link as I don’t have to do that again! 
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Radar Meteorology Project: Updating some results from Andrew Loconto’s Thesis. He created a radar gust equation for the Cape Canaveral Area to forecast for the speed of wind gusts. I validated this equation across the US and suggested new equations.
Advanced Stats Project: Using a 13-Year Dataset, my colleague and I found ways to determine a convective event at Cape Canaveral using many different Statistical projects.
Also I would like to announce that I have finally joined the twitter network. I find it just as good as plurk. Plus a lot of more famous people are on it (Like the weather channel and Boston’s NBC cheif meteorologist Pete Bouchard). You can follow me here
