02.10.10
News
I haven’t been working on the website much in the past couple of weeks as I have been too busy taking care of other irons in the fire. I would like to display a current weather banner on the forecast page of my website, along with some recent and relevant weather maps and a discussion, but I was not able to find any customizable banners that I liked. So…I decided to try my hand at designing my own. So far I have written several hundred lines of code in Perl that will take encoded weather observations from the National Weather Service, translate them into English, and display the results. However, currently the display is nothing fancy; so now I’m using my limited knowledge of Visual Basic to write code that will display the info in a “pretty” format. Stay tuned…hopefully I can get at least a prototype up and running in the next couple of weeks, depending on my other work.
I just received some good news today. My paper (based on my master’s thesis work on lightning) is one step closer to being published! I met with my previous adviser (from my M.S.) today, and after reading my draft last week, he thinks it looks pretty good! Most of his comments on the draft were regarding minor revisions, so it looks like the biggest part I’ll have to expand on will be the conclusions, as I had expected.
I also met with a professor in the OU School of Meteorology today to discuss PhD research ideas. I’m currently teaching this year, but looking for funding in meteorology/GIS. Very good news–his research ideas sound amazingly interesting, and he would like to have me work on the project! He is currently putting the finishing touches on a grant that he expects to be accepted in another month or two (probably the end of April by the latest). Without going into too much detail here, suffice it to say it would be another project in lightning, but with more of a spatial analysis angle. I would work on developing some new tools for visualizing and analyzing lightning data and then use those tools to answer some questions about lightning (mostly cloud-to-ground) and why it strikes where it does.
Tomorrow I hope to post on a few reasons as to why this winter has been the way it has been…primarily focusing on the cold and snow in the South and East. Hint: it may have something to do with a couple of little phenomena called the NAO and El Niño. Then on Friday…it’s the start of the Vancouver/Whistler winter Olympics! I’ll try to get some time to post on what the weather’s going to be like…will it snow or will it rain?