Visit to Boulder

I’m back from Boulder, and I have to say that it rocks! I was having a bit of trouble concentrating on my classes on Wednesday because of my impending trip, but at least I remembered to pay a couple bills and my taxes before I left. I also got my photo submitted to the Gustavus International Photo Contest, the sunset one (see my last post). And as an aside, I apologize if any of you were intending to leave comments on my last post and were unable to due to the lack of a link to the comment form. That’s because somehow some settings got changed accidentally that I didn’t notice on my blog, oops. On another note, Josh was abusing his administrator privileges by repeatedly deleting one person’s comments from my blog without my knowledge or approval. I finally figured out what was going on with that and confronted him with my displeasure, so hopefully everything will be fine from now on, sorry about that. But anyway, John was kind enough to drive me up to the Twin Cities airport on Wednesday afternoon so that I could catch my 7:20pm flight to Denver. The flight was rather uneventful apart from sitting on the tarmac in Minneapolis for 45 minutes or so, but once in Denver (which is a very nice airport, by the way) I managed to find my way to the Boulder Super Shuttle two minutes before its hourly departure. Boulder’s about 45 minutes from the Denver airport, so it was a bit after 10pm before I got to the Millenium Hotel in Boulder. I was surprised to find that I had a super-nice room, with a king-size bed, all to myself! It was just one more sign that PAOS (Program in Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences) was going all-out in recruiting us. 🙂 But I was kinda tired from travelling, so I turned in a bit early.
Thursday morning all of us PAOS recruits (about 15 of us or so, from all over the country) met for the first time in the hotel lobby. We walked up to campus for breakfast and a presentation of an overview of the department, and then a bunch of the faculty members gave little 10-minute presentations about their research and projects for which they were looking for new students. A couple of the current grad students took all of us recruits out to lunch at a popular student hangout called The Sink; it had a pretty cool atmosphere, with the low ceilings and walls absolutely covered in student murals and signatures. The afternoon was filled with individual meetings with various faculty, to further discuss their research and ask them questions about PAOS. I also sat in on a pretty cool weather forecasting seminar class, but on the downside it seemed like that was about the only forecasting/operational meteorology going on in the department. In the evening PAOS held a dinner party for us in the lounge way up at the top of the Duane Physics building, up on the 11th floor. What a view! It’s the (or one of the) tallest buildings in all of Boulder, so it has a fantastic view of the front range of the Rockies to the west, the city and the Great Plains to the east, and it also overlooks Folsom Field, the football home of the Colorado Buffaloes. But the dinner was pretty good, and not just because of the free food and beverages. 🙂 A bunch of the faculty were there again, and so were most of the current PAOS grad students, so we were all able to talk to them a bunch and get the low-down for what it’s really like at CU. Most of us recruits were pretty tired from all the information and meetings, so we headed back to the Millenium by 9 to relax before another early night.
Friday morning we had to pay for our own breakfast, so I eschewed it. Friday was the day for touring the acronyms around Boulder. We started out with an hour or so at LASP, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. LASP is a group that gets quite a bit of its funding from NASA (but LASP is older than NASA), and among the things LASP has been involved in over the years include numerous satellites observing Earth and the Sun, plus satellites that either have already visited or will soon be visiting every other planet in the solar system, including a satellite that will be departing on a mission for Pluto in the not-too-distant future. LASP also does a lot of cool research into space weather and the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere.
Then we moved onto the NOAA Boulder Lab, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (they also share a building with NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, home of the Atomic Clock, among other things). NOAA does a lot of research into meteorology, forecasting/computing methods, climatology, plate tectonics/geology, and actually pretty much anything dealing with Earth sciences. Unfortunately we didn’t get much of a tour of show of what they’re researching, but we still got to see something pretty cool. It was NOAA’s new toy, the world’s first spherical movie screen. It’s a 6-foot-diameter sphere, with four projectors exactly 90 degrees apart from each other, run by four top-of-the-line PC’s in parallel, that can visualize different things on Earth, Mars or the Sun. It’s pretty cool being able to see yearly satellite loops on a sphere, instead of on a flat distorted projection. I mean, it was a sweet 45-minute presentation, but since we only had an hour there, it would’ve been nice to see a bit of the research they’re doing there, particularly since if I go to the University of Colorado for grad school, I’ll likely be heavily involved with NOAA.
But after our stop at NOAA, we took the drive on the Buff Bus up to Table Mesa to see NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The NCAR building, snuggled up on the mesa above Boulder right next to the Flatiron Ranges, is a world-famous landmark building designed by I.M. Pei, which actually made him a world-famous architect. At any rate, all of us PAOS recruits had the privilege of having lunch with the Director of NCAR, which was pretty sweet. He told us about all sorts of stuff that NCAR’s involved in, including working with CU/PAOS, LASP, NOAA and other groups on developing WACCM, the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model, which will be one giant unified model of everything from the surface of the Sun to the surface of the Earth (and including the biosphere-atmosphere and ocean-atmosphere interactions). And in addition to all sorts of fascinating climatological research that they’re doing, they’re also collaborating with NOAA to develop WRF (pronounced “Worf,” as in the Klingon dude from Star Trek), the Weather Research & Forecasting Model, the next generation of forecasting models. One problem that NCAR foresees in the next few years is running out of space to store the mind-blowing amounts of data they’re collecting — they currently have a robotic system that moves around quite a few huge data plates (like giant hard drive disks) that each hold several petabytes of data (one petabyte is one million gigabytes) for their networks to access. They’re concerned about storage capacity because, among heaps of other things, they have several satellites that each collect multiple terabytes (thousands of gigabytes) of data per week. Needless to say, that’s A LOT of data. We also got a bit of a tour of the SCD (Scientific Computing Division) at NCAR, and they showed us some pretty sweet 3D projection visualizations of storms and satellites, in addition to a lava-lamp-like (at least in terms of hypnotic and addictive value, hehe) visualization of a year’s worth of global satellite data. That and we got a cool blue-light pen too!
After another couple of faculty meetings back at CU, I went on a walk to Pearl Street with one of the other PAOS recruits. Pearl Street is a cool pedestrian mall at the heart of Boulder that has lots of shops, street performers and the like, it’s kind of like a combination of Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis and State Street in Madison, it’s pretty cool. Then after a catnap back at the hotel, it was time for a party at one of the grad students’ houses, with free pizza and beer, it was pretty sweet. It was quite a valuable part of the visit actually, as we were really able to find out how everything was in PAOS, which professors to avoid, which ones to definitely work for, what classes were good or bad, and all sorts of stuff like that. The grad students whose house it was had two dogs there as well, that were endless sources of entertainment for the night, they were hilarious dogs. One of them, in addition to always having a ball that it was playing with, was also obsessed with lights. For instance, if someone was shining a flashlight on the floor, it would constantly attack the lit area of the floor, it was pretty funny.
This morning I barely made the 7:45am Super Shuttle from the hotel back to the airport, for my 10:40am flight back to Minneapolis. The trip was uneventful apart from the beginning, when it got really really windy in Denver right before we left, meaning that between take-off and about 20,000 feet it was incredibly bumpy and turbulent (almost sickeningly so), but I guess flying into or out of the Denver airport is usually exciting in that way. 🙂 Carl and Seth kindly picked me up at the airport (in exchange for my picking them up from the airport at midnight next Wednesday night), and on the way back to GAC we stopped by the Apple Store in Southdale to pick up and ogle at some goodies, hehe. But basically since I got back to campus, I’ve been watching college basketball on TV (plus spending a bunch of time writing this while sitting here on the couch). Man, how I love college hoops. March Madness is my favourite time of the year!
There’s actually quite a bit of interesting research going on at The University of Colorado, from El Nino-Southern Oscillation to cloud physics to the effects of high-energy solar particles on the atmosphere (aurorae and upper stratospheric ozone depletion), but not much of anything dealing with operational meteorology (forecasting, etc); CU seems to be focused primarily with the atmospheric physics and atmospheric chemistry sides of atmospheric science, rather than meteorology, which is kind of a bummer. The plus side is that while at grad school at CU in PAOS, you’re not limited to CU/PAOS faculty — you’re free to find a research advisor at NOAA, NCAR, LASP, or any of the other institutes around Boulder. It is the atmospheric science capital of the world, after all, with over 2000 atmospheric scientists living in Boulder. So Boulder is still an option that I’m considering, it’s certainly in a beautiful area, and has lots of options in atmospheric science to pursue for research. It’s definitely an area I’ll consider working in after I get my degree, too. But right now I wish I could visit Penn State right away, so I can make the comparison while I have CU fresh in my mind. Two weeks won’t be too long to wait though, and at least this’ll give me a bit of time to process all the information I got from this weekend, and figure out some other questions to ask the people at Penn State while I’m there. But hey, I had a nearly free three-day vacation to Boulder in the spring when it was in the 60s there, you can’t really beat that! 🙂