Matthew's Journal

I'm retiring the use of this software to run my journal and I've switched to Wordpress. The transition is still a work in progress, but, for the moment, you should use the URL millercommmatt.com/wordpress. Eventually, you'll just be able to use millercommamatt.com to view my journal, photos, and anything else I put up.

I like all the mammatus clouds that you see at the very end of the video.

We're already more than a month into the Atlantic hurricane season. If you're looking for some nifty online tools to keep track of storms this year I'd like to recommend Stormpulse. Stormpulse provides a pretty slick interface to view a storm's history and forecast path and intensity. Check it out!

http://www.stormpulse.com/

For work, I've been thinking about ways to easily track the movement of convective cells in radar data. It's easy to define the existence of a convective cell as any area with a reflectivity greater than a certain threshold. If you stack successive radar scans on top of each other you can used what's called connected component labeling to track how convective cells move across a radar domain so long as some part of the cell occupies the same area from one scan to the next. Thus, you can keep track of what happens to a cell as it moves, splits, merges, dies out, etc...

Below is a visualization where I show three radar scans from a collection of scans. Also displayed is a 35 dBZ isosurface that shows how convective cells move and change between the scans displayed. This isn't a methodology and toolkit that I've perfected for research use yet, but the image below represents a good proof-of-concept.

I'd like to congratulate the VORTEX 2 research teams. They finally managed to collect some data on tornado producing super cells. There is only a week left in the project and a lot of people where worried that they would go the whole project without observing a single tornado.

Many of my co-workers here at NCSU left this week to participate in the VORTEX 2 field research project in the Great Plains. The purpose of VORTEX 2 is to study the formation of tornadoes. VORTEX 2 involves hundreds of researchers from dozens of universities and labs. The NCSU research team consists of 5 graduate students and Dr. Matthew Parker. You can follow the blogs of the NCSU vortex participants via the following links:

Casey Letkewicz:
http://travelstomunchkinland.wordpress.com/

David Stark:
http://supercelluarstormchasing.wordpress.com/

NCSU Team Blog:
http://wolfpackvortex.blogspot.com/

I'm not participating in this field research project, but I know the participants would enjoy receiving your interest and your questions and comments.

Today is my last full day aboard the Ronald Brown. We're scheduled to arrive in Arica around 10:00am local time tomorrow. Already things are winding down on the ship. There are numerous conversations about what people are going to do when the get to Arica. Mostly the discussions center around travel plans, where to get good food, and what bars are within stumbling distance of the hotels. People are starting to pack up their things, stow equipment, and clean up their work areas. While I'm not packing my clothes into my duffel bag just yet, I am working on tidying some things up and getting ready to have Jake take my place. I'm making sure all the data I've collected so far is organized and written to my external hard drives. I'm making sure that I've collected any data from the other scientists that I think will come in handy. I'm making sure that I have a lot of written instructions so that Jake will have a reference for how to do some of the tasks that I've had to figure out on my own.

Overall, things just feel like they're coming to a close. While my part in the VOCALS project is nearing its conclusion, things aren't over yet. There's still one more day of data to collect. On the 5th of November, Guy Fawkes Day, I'll be training Jake on the things I've been doing on ship and on the things I've learned so far. I'm trying to get a speaking spot at the mid-project meeting on the 6th to present an outline of how we're using the Brown's C-band radar, some interesting things we've seen in the data, and where we're putting our data for the world to preview. Speaking of that final point, the NCSU online field catalog can be found at precip.meas.ncsu.edu/vocals. When I go home to Raleigh, VOCALS will still be going strong. While my month long odyssey will come to a close, Jake's will just be beginning. Also, once I'm home, I'll probably take my place in the shore-side support role. While I've been on the Ronald Brown, the rest of the research group back at NCSU has been working hard processing raw data and analyzing the meager amount of data the Brown's limited internet bandwidth allows me to send out.

I'm starting to get excited about the prospect of getting off the ship. The thing I'm looking forward to the most is sleeping in a bed that doesn't move. Anyone with romantic notions of the ocean waves gentle rocking them to sleep has never been woken up by bumping their head into the wall when the boat makes a sudden roll. I've gotten used to sleeping on a pitching and rolling ship, but that by no means suggest that I prefer it to my usual terrestrial sleeping arrangements.

Most of the instruments that are deployed either on an open-ocean buoy or on the mooring line are unable to transmit their data to shore via satellite phone. They have to store their data on internal memory cards. As a result, if you want to collect the data from those instruments you have to recover the buoy and the mooring line, disassemble the instruments, and extract the memory cards. Now, the buoys that you recover have usually spent a year or more in open waters with only birds and aquatic life to keep them company. In fact, many sea critters decide to call the buoy and it's mooring home. After a year at sea, the buoy and mooring line harbor their own ecosystem. Read on to see what I mean.

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