A new adventure begins on DYNAMO

It’s probably a bad omen to begin a new series of travelogue posts by admitting you’ve been too busy to write, but that’s the situation I find myself in now. I’m sitting in a faux-modern airport in Doha, the capital of Qatar in the Middle East, wrapping up my first 24 hours on the road. I’ve been in Doha for a few hours now – but they have free (albeit slow) internet and I got ice in my Pepsi, so life isn’t all that bad. My final destination this time the small Addu-Atoll. It’s one island that makes up the Maldives. The island is a few hundred kilometers off the southern-tip of India and I’ll be spending the next six weeks there. This post, one that I’ve been trying to find the time to write for a week now, is meant as an introduction to my trip and some of the things I’ll be writing about.

I’m going to Gan to contribute my efforts to the DYNAMO field experiment, which is a very-very-very large international weather experiment, funded in a large part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States. DYNAMO, being scientific, is of course an acronym – standing for DYNAmics of the Madden-Julian Oscillation. Without going into too many details, the Madden-Julian Oscillation (or MJO for short) is a very large, spatially and temporally, wave of weather activity that begins in the Indian Ocean and propagates eastward through the maritime continent and into the Pacific. The MJO is marked by distinctive wind patterns and huge amounts of precipitation. Being a wave, it transports these characteristics as it moves. Because it’s so large the MJO can move humongous (scientific term) amounts of heat, or energy, and moisture from one region of the globe to the other. Its time scale straddles between weather (a few days to a week) and climate (the mean conditions for period of many weeks, months, or years). Connecting the bridge between weather and climate remains a serious challenge for my field. DYNAMO was funded in part to give us observations, otherwise very sparse because the phenomenon largely occurs over the open-ocean, with which we can try to piece together an understanding of how the MJO forms, moves, and dies. These very prescient questions have been called the “holy grail” of tropical meteorology.

So how did I get involved? A few years ago my group at NCSU co-wrote a proposal along with Adam Sobel, my former adviser at Columbia, and one of his post-docs to do some analysis of the radar data being collected during DYNAMO. Our goal was to use this analysis to develop a new convective parametrization (how a weather model “simulates” precipitation) that could be used in global climate models (GCMs). Despite this being, in my humble opinion, a very nice idea, our proposal did not get funded (lots of good ideas are not being funded nowadays due to the economy, etc.). At the same time we were developing this proposal I wrote an application for a separate funding opportunity, a student travel fellowship, through the NSF. They were essentially looking for warm bodies to go and help launch balloons, man the radars, and otherwise help with the experiment. I was selected due to my abilities to both A) be a warm body and B) launch balloons and man a radar etc.

I was placed to work on one of the two radars (the other being the Texas A&M University Smart-R), on the Gan (which has come to be called the “supersite” due to the high density of observations being collected there). Let me state for the record how happy I am to be on solid ground for 6 weeks instead of being deployed on one of the ships trolling the rough waters of the Indian Ocean during the experiment. I’ll be working with Bob Houze’s group from the University of Washington, on the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) S-PolKa radar. I’m sure to ramble on about S-PolKa later, but just let me say how cool it is to get to work on one of the only dual-polarization dual-wavelength (S and Ka band) radars in the world. I believe the capabilities of this particular type of radar, such as relative humidity retrievals in real-time, can revolutionize the way we predict and understand precipitation. Very cool stuff.

As in the past I will try to keep the science in this blog to a minimum and try to entertain you with the who, what, when, where and why of international travel. If you’re interested in the science of DYNAMO I’ll be attempting to write some posts for the DYNAMO blog that’s been maintained by a small group of climate scientists led by Adam Sobel (Columbia) and Eric Maloney (Colorado State I believe). It’s on the web at www.maddenjulianconversation.blogspot.com. I think that’s all for now. Three more flights over ~15 more hours to go until I reach Gan. I’m really looking forward to the last flights in where I’m told the views of the pristine Indian Ocean are really spectacular.

Cheers,
Casey