Micronesia: Day 2

Monday, June 24, 2013

Started 7:40 A.M.

Yo dawgs. So, last night before I wrote the last part of my blog, I went on a little adventure with one of my roommates and two other girls on the trip. We just decided to walk through town and explore the area. We didn't walk an extraordinarily long distance, but the walk is one I won't soon forget.

We started out heading towards Kolonia, which I believe is the most developed city in all of Micronesia. Of course, if you were a visitor like us, you would think that the standard of living is horrible. It doesn't seem too bad, but Kolonia is poorer than any other city I have seen in the U.S.

We had to be cognizant of where we were walking because there were no sidewalks and the cars that were driving on the road were driving pretty darn fast. We walked past the Bank of Guam, the U.S. embassy, the Ace Hardare and Office Supplies stores (which are affiliated with the Ace we all know and love) and the Ace grocery store (which is not). We walked past an old gas station, where the price for gas is $5.19 a gallon. We walked into some other grocery store and looked at some of the things they had. There was a lot of SPAM, which is typical of islands in the Pacific. They had some Top Ramen as well, and some canned stuff. My roommate and one of the girls bought frozen tootsie roles. They were one dollar each, which is pretty expensive, but I would imagine that's still cheaper than anything affiliated with Housing and Food Services at the University of Washington. We saw these crabs that lived on land and were extremely fast, and we saw lots of big snails on one place where there was a little stretch of sidewalk.

We had been warned about the feral dogs on the island, but they looked pretty cute when we had seen them during the day. At night, this was not true. We saw two males and a female dog off in the distance, and one of the males was having sex with the female. After that, the males got in a really vicious fight, and we decided to turn back. It was like a dog park in Seattle, but 100 times as violent. Pretty scary stuff.

We saw people drinking Kava, which is a drink on the island that has narcotic effects and tastes like dirt. We walked up to another store and saw massive amounts of cheap alcohol and some generic brand frosted flakes. I'll have to get the frosted flakes. The drinking age here is 21, but even if it was younger, I'd probably abstain from alcohol. It was really cheap and probably tasted horrible, and I don't see any redeeming factor in getting drunk in Micronesia. Besides, I don't like to drink anyway.

Time for breakfast.

Ended 7:56 A.M.

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Started 2:19 P.M.

Well, I just got back from a small excursion identifying mangroves by the shoreline. We walked through the water and also found some cool/deadly organisms, which I will list in order of danger. A seahorse (probably nothing to worry about), a small moray eel (wait a couple years, and this guy will pose a serious threat), and a stonefish. A stonefish has these spikes on its back that, if you step on it, can cause excruciating pain and death due to the venom they harbor. To make matters worse, a stonefish looks exactly like a jagged rock. I'm surprised we were able to find one.

EDIT 7:21 A.M.: Here are some pictures from the adventure (yesterday). I was too tired to post them last night

Ended 7:54 A.M. (I told you the internet was slow!

Also, I unfortunately don't have the pictures of the moray eel, seahorse, and stonefish as they were taken underwater, but I will post them here when I can get them from the people who had underwater cameras.

Looking out from the Kamar estuary (this isn't a straight look out from out hotel, the PCR hotel, but our hotel is on the same estuary.

This large, prominent cliff feature is called Sokehs Rock, and is situated on Sokehs Island. It is a volcanic plug... Pohnpei was formed by volcanic activity, but there is no volcanic activity elsewhere.

"Pencil Roots" associated with the Sonneratia genus

Prop roots associated with the Rhizophora genus

Julian Sachs (the professor on the trip) looking at things (Rhizophera)

 My poor attempt at a panorama shot looking offshore from the estuary

Happy people

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We also went swimming, which was awesome. The water is ridiculously hot in places and warm in others. We have a meeting with the USDA in 20 minutes, so I got to take a shower and get this saltwater off me. Deuces

Ended 2:24 P.M.

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Started 10:11 P.M.

Hey everybody. It's pretty late, so I'm not going to write a whole bunch. Unfortunately, I was extremely tired during the USDA meeting... probably because of all the swimming the afternoon before. We mainly talked about the NRCS, which stands for the National Resources Conservation Service, which is a division of the USDA, just like the National Weather Service (NWS) is a division of NOAA. The goal behind NCRS is to help people help the land, and they focus on a variety of program areas to help accomplish this goal. Some of the main things they do are provide technological support, help the government to help the people, and do what they can to help manage the resources they have. When it comes to directly spending resources on ecosystem and farmland problems, the presentation given by the woman affiliated with the NRCS in Micronesia laid out five important points with respect to the environment that the NRCS thinks are pivotal goals to accomplish their goal of building a sustainable blueprint on the island that can be maintained in the future. These are:

Soil (primarily erosion)
Water (quantity and quality)
Air (mainly quality... we have plenty of air to go around)
Plants (healthy soil, overall plant growth)
Animals (primarily wildlife habit, which is definitely a function of soil, water, and plants. Most animals can tolerate bad air quality, but I'm sure there are a few that are more sensitive than others.

I just call these primary goals the SWAPA goals. Unfortunately,the extent to which these goals can be carried out is often inadequate, as it is expensive to keep these offices in foreign countries open.

A significant part of the lecture was about piggeries on Pohnpei. The woman said that a common saying was "If you don't own a pig, you're not Pohnpeian." This makes sense... there were 6281 households in Pohnpei (in 2010, I believe) but there were more than 2,000 piggeries at the same time. That's a lot of pigs. These pigs are not small animals... they commonly grow to 200 pounds, and the really fat ones can to 500 pounds. While these pigs provide a lot of bacon for consumption on the island, there are a lot of problems associated with them, with the main problem being pig feces.

Piggeries release diseases, bacteria, and nutrients such as nitrate and phosphate in the water. Nitrate and phosphate can cause eutrophication that is detrimental to the water, and the diseases/bacteria can make people very sick. The vast majority of rivers on Pohnpei are not safe to swim in because of high counts of E Coli, originating cheifly from pigs but humans as well, as hamny humans dispose of their waste by putting it in a river. Even the tap water here is unsafe to drink; it is full of amoebas, E Coli, and a bunch of other nasty, nasty bacteria, viruses, and random other stuff that you do not want to drink. I get pretty paranoid when I take a shower... I make sure my mouth is closed at all times, and it's important to be super careful or even abstain from going in freshwater due to an open cut on your foot, as the nasty stuff in the river can infiltrate your body via an open sore and give you a miserable couple days, weeks, and even months.

At last, they touched on detrimental farming techniques, such as the heavy tilling of soil and the increased potential for runoff into a river doing so. They've offered the farmers compost as an alternative to tilling so that they can still get adequate food production from the trees while being more environmentally friendly.

Unfortunately, because I was so tired, I feel like I missed out on some parts of the presentation and missed some details. Tomorrow, I will spend a day hiking through mangrove swamps, and I'm pretty excited about that. I'll post a couple pictures from my day, and then I'll hit the sack.

Thanks for reading. There's so much stuff to talk about here and I cannot get every single thing. Only two full days have passed, but I get the feeling that this experience while affect the way I see the world for the better. Our lives our like tapestries... the development of the soul depends on the experiences ou have, the people you meet, and the general discoveries you make every day. I've had everything from increased scientific knowledge of mangroves to a better understanding of how the Micronesian government works to moments where witnessing the Micronesians has made me think about all the resources I take for granted.

I'm exhausted. Peace.

Ended 10:55 P.M.

Micronesia: Day 1

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Retrieved from Wikimedia commons

Started 7:24 A.M.

Greetings from Micronesia! My plan for these blog posts while I'm here is to have a summary of each day. I'll write things at different times as the day goes on and I will post various pictures. After 6 P.M. Micronesia time, we generally have the evening off, and I'll try to write a more detailed summary of the day with perhaps an interesting blogging topic about some aspect of Micronesia. Just a little background: The Federated States of Micronesia contains four island-states. From east to west, these are Kosrae, Pohnpei (where we are staying at), Chuuk, and Yap. In addition to these four states, there are hundreds of little islands: around 607 (including the four states) that compromise Micronesia.

The population of the entire country is 106,104 (2013 estimate), and the land area is 702 square kilometers (271 square miles). The population density is 158.1 people per square kilometer (409.6 people per square mile). The official currency is the U.S. dollar, and the GDP (PPP) is 3,000 dollars. The population is almost exclusively Pacific Islander with a small Asian minority, but it is important to break the "Pacific Islander" label into the individual ethnicities of the population. There's a whole bunch of useful information on the Wikipedia page, so if you want a more in-depth discussion of the country, check it out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_States_of_Micronesia

Breakfast is at 8! See ya later!

Finished 7:57 A.M.

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Started 8:50 A.M.

Breakfast was pretty good. We had a salad mixed with bananas, oranges, some leafy vegetable that is found on the island (it tastes like spinich), eggs with a little pepper and milk, and toast on white bread with a little bit of butter. I had some soy juice, which isn't too bad.

There is a Catholic Church service that I am leaving for at 9:15, and the actual service starts at 9:30. It will be interesting to see the service. I'm wearing the nicest clothes I brought (a Hawaiian shirt and some very thin, waterproof pants, whose only redeeming factor for church clothing is that they are not shorts). It has rained intermittently at time this morning, but it was raining constantly yesterday afternoon when we got here, heavy at times. By the way, I am counting this as "day 1" because it is the first full day we have spent here.

We left the Seattle airport at noon on Thursday the 20th, and we got here at ~4 pm on Sunday the 23rd. We flew from Seattle to Los Angeles, then had a two or three hour layover before flying to Honolulu. Then, we had a seven hour layover and tried to sleep in the airport (I might have gotten 30 minutes of sleep, for which I feel very thankful) and then embarked on our 11 hour flight to Pohnpei.

There were some sobering health moments on the plane. Before we boarded the plane from Honolulu to Majuro or Kwajalein (I can't remember which... the plane went to several small islands before reaching Pohnpei), an elderly woman was moaning at the Honolulu airport and was in a great deal of distress with her daughter by her side trying to comfort her. Close to when we were getting off the plane, the one flight attendant asked the daughter if her mother had moved at all during the flight, and the daughter said she hadn't. She had just assumed she was sleeping and extremely tired, which was a perfectly reasonable assumption given her physical state. The daughter then tried to wake her up, but she did not wake up. When we landed, a local ambulance was called and she was taken on the tarmac where the medics performed CPR. That's all I know, but unfortunately she likely passed away. Another elderly man was picked up from Kwajalein (I think, but it could be Majuro). The only consoling fact was that the woman who died was in an enormous amount of pain and misery before she passed away, so I hope she is in a better place, and the man was on the way to get some assistance. I got to go to church now. Goodbye.

Finished 9:02 A.M.

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Started 10:45 A.M.

I just got back from church. What an amazing experience. I'm not religious or atheist (I actually consider atheism a type of theism because you believe in the absence of supernatural things), I'm just open to all interpretations (society labels this as agnostic, but I feel as though agnosticism is highly individualized by nature, so I don't like using 'agnostic' as a generalized label), and I think this was one of the most spiritually fulfilling events of my life. I'll have to take some time to think about it, and I'll write more about it this evening after we eat dinner. For now, I'm headed to a class on the history of Pohnpei, then lunch, then a hike, then some science review stuff, then some government review stuff, and then we got dinner.

Here are some pictures that I've uploaded at 9:49 P.M. These pictures are not of the church... they are outside. There was a cool monument that was built that I took pictures of. I think this was built by the Spanish, but I'm not sure.

Looking at the monument

Some of the students on our trip

Our group! (minus Julian Sachs, the group leader and a professor of chemical oceanography at the UW)

Finished 10:51 A.M.

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Started 2:11 P.M.

Goin on a hike. Deuces.

Finished 2:11 P.M.

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Started 4:12 P.M.

Finished the hike. Absolutely amazing. I have a class about the Pohnpei government in 18 minutes, which will last from 4:30 to 6. Right after that, I have dinner, and after that we have some free time. It's pretty rainy here, but the rain has been relatively light. Yesterday, the rain was moderate to heavy at times... although nothing I haven't seen before. I'm hoping to see a crazy intense rainstorm sometime while I'm here.

Here are some pictures, which I uploaded at 9:04 P.M.

An awesome waterfall

A weird kid

A dog (there are TONS of dogs on this island)

A miniature figure of Jesus

A beautiful flower. There were lots of these on the trip. I haven't identified it yet... hopefully I can do that soon.

Ended 4:14 P.M.

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Started 9:55 P.M.

The pictures all took an enormously long time to load. It's getting late and I'm getting tired, but before I go to bed, I'll write about my thoughts on the church service. Just a warning beforehand... I might not be the best at articulating these thoughts right now, but I think they are very important.

The entire service was in Pohnpeian, so I didn't understand any of it, although I heard one of the priests (there were two) say "Jesus" a couple times, so I was able to catch on to that. The church was very simple and was not ornate in any way. There were plenty of fans to help keep people cool, and the doors were open for the entire service. The service was fairly long... I didn't time it, but I would guess that it lasted close to an hour and a half. 

When I was in this church, I was very observant, and since there wasn't much to see architecture-wise, I focused on the people. When I saw these people... everybody from the little kids walking down the aisle dressed up in Catholic attire (I don't know what else to call it) to the people in the audience of all ages, I saw a sort of humbleness and calmness that is unlike anything I have ever seen in the states. The priests gave special recognition to us, and the audience gave us a big round of applause.

I've always said I'm a minimalist, but seeing these people took it one step further. Many Americans would classify their standard of living as poor and unfortunate. But I did not see any frowns on the faces of the Micronesians throughout the service or when we exited the church. They all seemed to be happy and humble, like they had nothing to prove and were so thankful for our participation in their service. This made me think about the U.S. and the things we do to make ourselves happy. Some people buy huge houses because they love the luxury of living in a beautiful home, and if it's situated on the waterfront or has a great view, all the better. Others buy super nice cars. Others take pride in scientific research, some have hobbies like skiing or football or fishing. But looking at these Micronesians, I noticed how happy they seemed with so little money. I haven't noticed any significant difference in the well-being and happiness of people who own expensive things. I have witnessed people experience joy from research, teaching, or their hobbies. But even these things take resources. Skiing is very expensive, people always want to get the best fishing rods, reels, and boats possible, and for watching football you need a huge flat-screen t.v. and ridiculous amounts of Coors Light. 

I realized that you can live a fulfilling life out of very few resources. It'd be cool to be a professional athlete, an incredible jazz saxophonist, or an esteemed lecturer at a prestigious university, but these are not things you need to be happy. Living in a community where you can simply be with and help other people could be perfectly satisfying. I'm very ambitious, but ambition and accomplishment do NOT always equal a sense of fulfillment. Don't stress if you fail a class or go through a difficult breakup. Even if you've lost everything in your life, you haven't lost your human nature for love and companionship. Be with people, grow from them, love them, help them. There's nothing more you need.

Time to hit the sack for another great day tomorrow!

Finished 10:22 P.M.

Charlie

Digging for Ducks

Thursday, May 30, 3013
9:56 P.M.

Hey folks, it's been awhile. Busy would be an understatement. But I have a bit of free time tonight before my next midterm, and I wouldn't want to be skimping on my duty to provide you with safe* forecasts to plan your days around.

But seeing as watching the models right now is about as exciting as watching a sliced apple oxidize, I'm not going to provide you with any forecasts today. Remember how I said I was going to go geoducking over Memorial Day weekend? Well, on Sunday, geoducking I went, and with the help of my brother, my parents, two friends, and the geoducks, we were unearth some from the deep.

First, let me introduce my 'primary' crew. My kid brother, Henry Phillips, is in the yellow, my personal 70's transplant Mikko Johnson is in the red, and my favorite internationally-known soccer star Jannel Banks is in the blue. I am a mix of yellow, red, and blue; my shorts are yellow with navy blue flowers, and my body is in the process of getting sunburnt. More about that later.

First, let me describe the typical process through which a recreational geoduck team gets their clams. First, a person on the team finds a geoduck siphon sticking above the sand. I've already dug up most of the geoducks on beaches around the sound, so they usually make a circle around the geoduck to remember where it is and immediately call the rest of their team over.

After this, they center a massive tube around the hole and start unearthing the sand inside the tube while gradually pushing the tube down. This tube is used to prevent the sides of the hole they did from collapsing inward, as geoducks bury themselves anywhere from 2 to as much as 5 1/2 feet (I know this from personal experience) under the sand. When I say massive, I mean massive, these tubes generally range from 3-5 feet in length and 1-2 feet in diameter. They are not available in stores - they are welded from scratch and are usually constructed of aluminum.

As the team continues to remove sand from the inside of the tube, they gradually push the tube down into the sand to continue their excavation process. The problem is that there is a massive amount of friction that prevents the tube from easily further penetrating the sand (not to mention that there are often stray clam shells embedded in it). It's here where the "team" part really comes into play.

Teams will adopt certain strategies to push the tube further downward into the sand. The most common one is to simply have a person jump on a piece of wood that is laid over the top of the tube. I've seen some pretty creative ways though... with one particularly large tube that had handles embedded in it, the people placed a long, long board through it and jumped periodically on either end so that the tube was oscillating upward and downward in a sinusoidal motion. This method was actually pretty effective and impressive, but it obviously required a lot of people, a lot of materials, and a lot of work to get one clam.

Now, for the Phillips - approved method of getting geoducks.

____________________________________________________________

When we first got interested in geoducking, we did not have a giant tube. So we went down to the local hardware store (Sebo's, for those of you who frequent Whidbey Island) and bought a 24-inch-long stovepipe. There were different sizes, but we ended up getting ones that were 6 and 8 inches in diameter; this was our first attempt at getting geoducks, and we wanted to see which diameter would work best. This stovepipe was thin and flimsy, but it was all we had, so we thought we'd give geoducking a shot.

Since our pipe was so small, we could just use our hands to did out the sand. However, as time went on, we discovered that we could use a 'clam gun,' which is a tube with a handle and a hole for air that uses suction to pull sand out of the ground. These tubes are commonly used for razor clams but are never used for any other clams... at least outside of the Phillips family. The diameter of the clam gun is smaller than the diameter of the tube, so it fits right in.

Just like the 'veterans' who are supposedly better than us, we'd find the geoduck siphon and center the tube over it. Since our tube has such a small diameter, it is important to get the tube directly over the clam and perpendicular to the surface of the sand. As Mikko would say, you want to visualize the tube as a vector that is orthogonal to the x-y tidal plane such that the dot product of this vector and any vector on the plane would be zero. Mikko's an aeronautical engineering major, so he knows his stuff. At least I hope he does... I don't want to crash in an aircraft that he engineered.

Pushing this tube down is relatively easy compared to pushing down those big tubes that the others use. You can usually do it with just your hands. Since this tube/stovepipe is so thin, it has very sharp edges, so I usually place my sandals on top of the tube and push down on my sandals. There is much less friction here, so the tube can go down pretty easily provided there are not clamshells that are blocking its path. There usually are, so it's pretty common to take the tube out, remove the shell, and then put the tube back in before any sand falls into the hole.

You keep pushing and pushing the tube downward until you feel the neck of the clam, and then you go further until you can feel the body of the clam. You can't just pull these clams out by only grabbing their neck... they have a much 'foot' that tends to keep the clam anchored in the sand. It's unlawful to possess just the neck of a geoduck, so if you accidentally rip off the neck doing this, you may encounter consequences. I've done this a couple times, and although I avoided the penitentiary, I felt horrible. It's a common mistake, but an avoidable one if you just use your brain.

Pushing the tube down below the ground. The older man is my father.

Our tube is not perfect... far from it. It is bent at the ends due to hitting clam shells in the sand (although this can be straightened out with pliers). The bigger issue is that the tube is nowhere near long enough... nearly all geoducks bury themselves deeper than 24 inches. This means that we have to push the tube beneath the sand and dig on the outside of the tube in order to get the geoduck. I usually have to push the tube 8-12 inches under the sand, but there have been times when I've pushed it deeper. In fact, I've pushed it so deep that I've unintentionally buried the tube on two occasions. It's incredibly frustrating. Thankfully, these tubes are cheap... ten bucks.

Here, the tube is buried a good 18 inches under the sand, and we were not able to recover it as water and sand started to fill in the hole. I'm using the clam gun to try and remove sand from the inside of the tube to lessen the friction that holds it in place, but I was unable to. My brother is pulling on my arm because I was in an awkward position that made it hard for me to apply that much energy into pulling the clam gun out of the sand.

Even with all its flaws, this method has proven to be much more expedient at getting geoducks than the method others use with giant cylinders and wooden rectangles. I'm able to get geoducks solo without too much of a problem. People see me with the clam gun and assume I don't know what I'm doing, but after I pull geoducks from the sand like I'm trick-or-treating in the middle of the summer, some other geoduckers come and talk to me and ask me to teach them my method.

Why don't I have my shirt on? Well, I always start with my shirt on, but it often very quickly gets soaking wet, so I take it off. I haven't put sunscreen on beforehand during these occasions when I take it off, and I've gotten sunburnt. I didn't think it would be that bad this time because of the cloudy sky and rain showers, but I was wrong. I didn't peel, but it's five days later and still sensitive to the touch.

We ended up getting four geoducks and several horse clams that Jannel dug up with her bare hands (very, very impressive!). I wanted to get more and fulfill our limit, but my mom stopped me... and for good reason. Four geoducks is plenty. We made some delicious clam chowder, gave some away, and froze some to eat another day. We had an absolute blast. If you need any advice on any sort of clamming, contact me, and if you'd like to tag along to our next trip, let me know. I'd love to have you.
 
Charlie

*In no respect shall Mr. Phillips incur any liability for any damages, including, but limited to, direct, indirect, special, or consequential damages arising out of, resulting from, or any way connected to the use of his forecasts. Taking these posts too seriously could result in serious injury or death, so it's generally best to not read them at all.

A Change for the Cooler

Monday, May 20, 2013
~11:00 A.M.

A developing frontal system offshore will move into western Washington late tonight and a broad trough of low pressure will take up residence over the area through the week ahead. This will lead to cooler temperatures, showers, and low snow levels for late May. - Retrieved from The Seattle Office of the National Weather Service

It's no surprise that the first half of May has been extraordinarily warm. I came across a funny picture and caption circulating around the internet; it is in the same format as a meme you'd find on Reddit, but the picture used has not widely been used. At least not yet. In fact, on May 6, Sea-Tac reached an astounding 87 degrees, crushing the previous record by 8 degrees. That day, Seattle was tied for the highest temperature for a major city in the United States. Phoenix also reached 87. Places in Eastern Washington got even hotter; Yakima hit 90 degrees.

Credit: The Weather Channel

Now, things are much different. Today, highs will likely hit either side of 70 in much of the Puget Sound area, which is a few degrees above our average of 66, but things will take a turn for the 'terrible' (this is subjective... I love cool weather) on Tuesday. As the very first picture shows, we currently have a moderately strong frontal system developing off our coast, and this system will roll in late tonight into Tuesday. 

This storm won't cause massive flooding on area rivers or down trees and cut power to millions, but it will usher in a pattern change. There is a large pool of cold, unstable air originating from the Gulf of Alaska behind this system, and this air will be directed right into our area. With cool, unstable air and high sun angles due to this time of year comes the potential for thundershowers. The National Weather Service and KOMO (my favorite news station for weather... Scott Sistek writes excellent forecasts and does a great job of explaining the justifications for a particular weather forecast) were pretty gang-ho with a chance of thunderstorms on Wednesday as the unstable post-frontal air streams into the region, but they have backed off of of this forecast as of this morning due to lower forecast of CAPE (Convective Potential Potential Energy), which is a statistic that aggregates a whole bunch of individual model forecasts to get an overall view of how unstable the atmosphere is. Higher CAPE generally infers that there is a higher chance of thunderstorms over the area, as the cumulonimbus clouds responsible for these thunderstorms are formed be convection whereas more stratiform clouds are created by warm advection, radiational cooling (especially in the case of fog on the coast), and a variety of other factors.

Ostensibly record-setting geoduck clam (Panopea abrupta or Panopea generosa), Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, Seattle, Washington. Retrieved from Wikipedia Commons. Photo Credit: Joe Mabel

After this system comes through, highs in Seattle will be a good 5-10 degrees below average for the remainder of the week. 'Thankfully', (again, this is subjective, I'm indifferent to warm weather) highs will rebound all the way into the mid 60s by Memorial Day Weekend. I'm personally planning to go clamming up on Whidbey Island for some geoducks, which are giant, delicious clams that look like elephant trunks or penises (your choice). They sure taste good though. The geoduck above is the largest one ever caught, although there are certainly many much larger that have yet to be excavated. The last time I saw it was while I was exploring Seattle 'round midnight with a friend... she was flabbergasted, and even I was taken aback. You should see it too!

If you are looking to go clamming, hit me up and I can give you some information on which beaches to go to. One thing's for sure though. Stay off my territory. I've already decimated the local geoduck population enough. I don't know if it can withstand another beating.

Have a great day everybody! Thanks for reading/supporting/doing all you do to support my dream, you mean the world to me.

Chuck

Progress in Numerical Weather Prediction

Thursday, May 16, 2013
8:38 P.M.

Cliff Mass - Retrieved from UW Atmospheric Sciences Website

Many of you are familiar with Cliff Mass, an atmospheric sciences professor at the UW who has a weather blog (cliffmass.blogspot.com) and a weekly weather discussion slot on KPLU. He is very active in the public scope and gives many talks and lectures around the area, particularly ones that relate to math education, the need for a coastal radar (although not so much anymore since we now have one), severe weather of the Pacific Northwest (especially the Columbus Day Storm), and different types of modeling, with an emphasis on probabilistic ensemble forecasting where many models with slightly different initial conditions are run and the output from each ensemble "member" is analyzed. This probabilistic approach is, in my opinion, the future of forecasting, as it allows the forecasters to get an idea of the uncertainty in the forecast, the likelihood of certain specific outcomes, and an ensemble "mean" that is usually more accurate than one from a certain operational model initialized at 00z or 12z (Greenwich Mean Time).

This past year, he talked a lot about the superiority of European forecasting models over U.S. ones. This was especially apparent with Hurricane Sandy, where the European models predicted a catastrophic storm well before the American ones, which initially took the storm harmlessly eastward out to the Atlantic.

I read his blog often (and you should too), and his most recent post was a particularly noteworthy post. I'm not going to give you all the details of his post, as I don't want to take any credit for something he put in the time to wrote. Rather, I'll give you a brief summary and a link to the post.

After Hurricane Sandy, there was a lot of news in the mainstream media about how much better the European models had handled the storm than the American ones. As a result, the National Weather Service put a priority on increasing the accuracy of its medium range weather models buy obtaining more computational power. The National Weather Service expects to expand its computing power 37-fold from 70 teraflops now to 2600 teraflops by 2015. A teraflop is a trillion calculations per second... it sounds like it should be a trillion failures per second though. With this many teraflops, we'll be ahead of the European Center in terms of computational power, and hopefully behind them in number of forecast failures.

In other words, we'll have less of this...

IBM PC 5150 with keyboard and green monochrome monitor (5151), running MS-DOS 5.0 - Retrieved from Wikipedia - Photo Credit: Boffy b

... and more of this...

The IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer installation at the Argonne Leadership Angela Yang Computing Facility located in the Argonne National Laboratory, in Lemont, Illinois, USA - Retrieved from Wikipedia - Photo Credit: Argonne National Laboratory

Here is the link to his blog: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-new-chapter-for-us-numerical-weather.html. Please read it. Thanks.

Towelie is still stuck in the tree.
Charlie