Tussey Mtn Wildfire

Wow, that Dynamics final was nearly as pleasant as a root canal. Not that I really thought it’d be a whole lot better than that, but any exam that’s that crappy is still not fun to endure. I think I may have pulled out enough partial credit to do kinda okay, we’ll just have to see how nice Sukyoung is with this. I’m just glad that I got over my nearly hour-long brain fart and finally remembered the two equations for the geostrophic wind (which were actually staring me in the face), which allowed me to do one of the kinda-more-doable problems. I was the last one in the room taking the exam, but I didn’t want to give up, especially since it was something as simple as the geostrophic wind that I wasn’t remembering and was keeping me from doing the problem. That was sooooo frustrating… But at least it’s over at last. Dynamics is done!!!! And the Cloud Physics final yesterday was a little tougher than I thought it would be, but I still think I did okay on it. Now I only have Mesoscale left, that one’s Thursday morning at 10. Only 36 hours to freedom!
Today was a really long day. I had to get up really early so that I could be over in the Forum to help Dr Nese proctor the Meteo 003 final exam at 8am. That meant that I was a bit more tired than usual all day while doing my futile studying for Dynamics, oh well. That didn’t stop me from going to get some wings from Sports Cafe with Frame. I wasn’t feeling too well most of the rest of the afternoon, but I think that had just as much to do with being really nervous about the exam as it did the wings themselves. After the exam most of us went down to the Sports Cafe to get a beer and unwind (Shannon and a couple others wanted to watch the Sabres-Flyers hockey game), but for whatever reason they wouldn’t let Anke in, they didn’t like her German passport or whatever ID she showed them, which is rather strange. So everyone else left and went to some other place with Anke, but Daniel & I stayed put outside at Sports Cafe for awhile. We were just both really tired and worn out from the exam, and we only wanted one beer anyway before we knew we had to leave and get back to studying for Mesoscale, so we didn’t feel like walking who knows how much longer until they found a place to go.
Sunday I didn’t actually get any studying done for either Cloud Physics or Dynamics. Instead I got all the figures put into my Mesoscale paper, pushing it to 18 pages in length. I would’ve had one more figure, but I decided to axe it after Word would always add in hundreds of blank or duplicated pages into the middle of my paper. I’m not exaggerating, one time it added more than 700 pages, it was so weird. It wouldn’t let me undo it either, since it was something that the computer was doing on its own, it wasn’t anything I was doing. And since it happened every time I tried to text-wrap and right-justify that one figure, I decided it just wasn’t worth the trouble and canned it. So odd. I spent the whole rest of the afternoon and evening doing all my grading for Meteo 003. I had to get that last round of labs graded at some point before Thursday anyway, meaning I’d have to take time out from studying for one of my exams at some point, so I just wanted to get it all done and over with. But just think of it — I’m forever DONE with being a TA and grading stuff for Meteo 003! I don’t know what I’m gonna do with all this extra time… But I took a break from grading to go up on the roof of Walker (which for some odd reason was open) to take a peek at a gorgeous sunset. Note the bright sundog on the right side of the image, that’s part of what made the sunset really cool.
Monday we had some good breaks from studying for the Cloud Physics final, thanks to a wildfire that broke out on nearby Tussey Mountain, about 5-7 miles east of campus near Boalsburg, with flames 80-100 feet high at times. There was a steady stream of gawkers from the Meteo department heading up to the roof of Walker to peer at the smoke billowing from an area along Tussey Ridge. Apparently by this morning they had it contained, but it’s now partly out of control again this evening, and has charred well over 400 acres so far. In the early hours after the fire started the low-level winds in the boundary layer were blowing the smoke back towards State College (while the winds aloft were blowing from the west), making the air extremely hazy and reeking of woodsmoke. In the picture I showed above and to the left, you can see the smoke starting to “loop” (undulate), which is actually a really cool phenomenon to see happening, as the smoke is oscillating vertically right around the boundary between an unstable layer of air closer to the ground and a stable layer above. I’ve seen it in diagrams in textbooks before, but it’s still always cooler actually to see it in real life. The smoke plume from the wildfire even showed up (albeit fanitly) on the visible satellite yesterday afternoon. By this morning though, the winds had switched around and were blowing it back off to the east like normal.

Well, time to get to bed. I’ve given up on studying for tonight I think.