Family Feud!

Tonight was the Chi Epsilon Pi initiation ceremony, and it was a blast. (Chi Epsilon Pi is the national meteorology honor society, and I’m an officer (the secretary/historian) for the PSU chapter this year.) After the free pizza and official welcome/initiation pledge to the new members, we had a fun game: Meteo 003 Family Feud! We divvied everyone up into three teams, undergrads vs grad students vs faculty, and they all were trying to guess the responses that 125 Meteo 003 (an intro to meteorology course for mostly non-science majors) students gave to the following questions:
1) What is the hottest place on Earth? (5 answers)
2) How many days per year are overcast in State College? (8 answers, multiples of 10)
3) What is a weather phenomenon you associate with damage? (6 answers)
4) What is something you associate with meteorologists? (8 answers)
5) In what weather phenomenon can you observe an “overshooting top”? (6 answers; everyone cracked up when they saw there were six answers to that one, hehe)
6) On a 500-mb map, where would you find the lowest pressure? (10 answers, which again cracked everyone up)
7) What is the warmest temperature ever recorded in Alaska? (6 answers, multiples of 5 in degrees Fahrenheit)
8) How many inches of snow fell in State College last winter? (7 answers, multiples of 5)
Basically, knowing what the real answer was to any of these questions was not a guarantee of guessing the most popular answer, and sometimes not even of guessing any of the survey responses. After a slow start in the early rounds, the faculty held off the grad students in the final round to claim the victory, but everyone seemed to like the game and have heaps of fun, we were glad about that. If any of you out there want to try to guess what some of the responses were, feel free! I’ll let you know if you were right or if you earned a strike. 🙂
Well tonight I finally started to run SCIPUFF (the dispersion model I’m using) to create the model runs that will be a primary part of my thesis project. For the amount of model time I’m running it for and the amount of data I’m having it write out (and the huge size of my domain), each run will take somewhere between two and four days in real time to finish, I’m estimating (it just took 22 hrs for it to finish a test 6-hr model run, but I’m needing a 24-hr dispersion model for each ensemble member). Multiply that by 19 ensemble members that I need to do this for, and I might be able to be done with these SCIPUFF runs by Christmas. Ugh… But at least I’m starting to make real, visible and tangible progress on my thesis project.