The Human METAR

Happy Graduation Eve (and 400th post!)

So I have revamped the website to integrate some features from my Plymouth website here. Here is a list of the new features

• New Current Weather Page (with exclusive METAR map updated every hour)
• New Forecast Weather Page (with exclusive GFS models updated every 6 hours)
• New resume page with an updated bio page
• New links on the right hand side, including links to some social networking sites

A quick little update on my life. I will be graduating with my Master’s degree tomorrow during PSU’s graduate commencement ceremony. And June 1st I will be starting a summer internship with the NH Department of Transportation.

After long hard work. Tomorrow is the day I give my thesis defense. Weather permitting of course. As we have a nasty system heading our way. For now it looks like we may get a few inches overnight due to the 12 Z models, but I will have a little more confidence when I see the 18 Z.

Thesis_Defense_Abstract

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.

Good Morning! Just about three weeks into the internship down at Cape Canaveral, and I have already made some progress.

Currently I have 5 years of NCDC Storm Structure data for all the convective events between May and September on the KSC/CCAFS Complex. The Storm Structure data basically tells the user information about an individual convective cell on RADAR. Work performed by Andrew Loconto a few years back showed that one can possibly derive the peak wind gust from this information, however hehad a limited dataset. My next step is to go through all the files (about 4500) and determine which cell is closest to the wind tower that recorded the peak wind gust, and extract specific information and place it into a nice dataset for analysis. I am currently working on that via a perl script.

I have also seen a lot down on the complex. Yesterday alone we got to see a weather balloon go up (KXMR for you weather geeks), as well as visit the Cape Canaveral Light House, and a close view of the launch pad that contains GOES-O. Speaking of that, the Delta rocket will bring GOES-O up to space tomorrow evening, if weather permits. If all works well, GOES-O will become GOES-14 and become a backup to the weather satellites in operation. For more information, go here

and Finally, for the radar nerds (….me). Our vortex page got a new addition to the weather data database. We now have Terminal Doppler Weather Radar data for most of the United States. They work just like WSR-88D’s, but their wavelength is smaller, and so is their range. However it is “high-res” on velocity data. This is why most of the TDWR’s are located near airports, to detect low level wind shear and any turbulence in the area.

The data can be found here