The Frogurt Is Also Cursed

Went to a few presentations today. Most were either standing-room only or almost empty. At Noon, I took a tour bus out to Lakefront Airport which looks to be closed to the general public (not sure if it was Katrina damaged or not), but the Hurricane Hunter WC-130 and the NOAA research P-3 aircraft were both there. Very cool tours. And cjsmith, the WC-130 pilot said that they don't do any structural reinforcement above the normal combat-design for flying it into hurricanes.

The AMS offered bus tours of Katrina damaged areas of New Orleans each morning this week. I opted not to take one, because I didn't want to feel like I was looking at a show. Turns out I didn't really need to buy one of those tour tickets after all - the bus ride to and from Lakefront Airport passed through vast areas of damage. Houses in various states of disarray and reconstruction. Trailers in front yards. Debris and dirt everywhere. Sad.

This afternoon I met two scientist/authors at a book signing (Kerry Emanuel from MIT and Louis Uccellini from NOAA). Yes, I had them sign books I brought from home.

Tonight is the official opening of the vendor exhibition. At 5:30, I'm going to check it out and see what kind of free swag is available. :-)

Tomorrow begins a conference on lightning. My advisor is self-admittedly ignorant about lightning, and it's an interest of mine, so I figure this will be a good opportunity. I just need to get to the room in time to get a seat.

I noticed these while coming home with Toni around lunchtime, so I grabbed the 20D and snapped some shots from our driveway:

Gravity Waves

(Several of you have already seen the very cool shots of these kinds of waves in clouds over Iowa. Here's a basic explanation of what they are.)

Weather Radios Recalled by Oregon Scientific Due to Failure to Receive National Weather Service Alerts - Photos and specific model #s at the link. They're all variations of handheld/portable models.

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Apparently the Nappanee, IN tornado of Thursday night was ~1/2 mile wide, was down for ~20 miles, and was an EF3 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale (winds 136-165 mph).

From The Indianapolis Star:
- 160 mph winds rake Nappanee, damage hundreds of structures
- Damage Photos

Where the hell is Nappanee, IN?

That was fun. I-65 on the way to school this morning felt like I was making a 46-mile left turn. The little Civic just doesn't have that much mass. And the wind advisory doesn't even start until 9:00am. I'm just glad I don't have a higher-profile vehicle.

Need to study for my tests this weekend. And maybe hit the grocery if we're out of anything. Also need to make some tweaks to some song edits for J's dance coach in Ipswich. They shouldn't take too long. And, I completely forgot about making discs for geekchick's CD exchange. Crap!

Finally nailed down my project for my radar class at my meeting with my advisor yesterday. She talked to the engineering folks who are coding our new visualization app, and they have an algorithm for interpolating irregular-spaced data onto grids. It's different than the objective analysis stuff I've been reading about from my prof (uses some 10th order polynomial expansion). So, for my project, I'm going to take some of the radar data we have from the Caribbean field campaign and convert it using one of my prof's algorithms and the engineer's algorithm and compare the two. Fun with FORTRAN. At least my prof has been good at commenting his code.

After break, I need to start forming my committee. I'm thinking the engineering prof who heads up the viz team should be on it, but the issue with him is that, since he heads up so many ACM and IEEE organizations, he's never here. Otherwise, I've met several EAS profs - I just need to decide (who and how many). Then I need to come up with an official plan of study and file it by the end of the semester. Since we're not changing my status to Ph.D. until Fall semester, I can go with a lighter M.S.-based one for now. They're always in flux, anyway.

Finally, I <3 xkcd!! :-)

...Lookin' out my front door:

- Out the Door
- Top of the Driveway
- Looking down the Hill

Watching Storm Stories on TWC, they were covering the Stoughton, Wisconsin tornado from the huge outbreak from August, 2005. I started looking up info online about that outbreak and learned that FEMA apparently denied a federal disaster declaration for the damage. The maintainers of the web site I first linked point to a CafePress store for FEMA Sucks merchandise that likely originated with Hurricane Katrina, but seems applicable to their situation.