SCIPUFF Frustrations

Today has been a bit of a frustrating day. My plan was to get all sorts of figures made for my thesis, so that I could start writing by the weekend. Instead, in doing some testing to make sure that converting the units of concentration in SCIPUFF from kg/m3 to fL/L is working as it’s supposed to, I discovered that SCIPUFF, when using identical inputs and settings, does not produce identical concentration patterns. Argh! I haven’t noticed this before because until a couple days ago I was apparently looking at concentrations spanning six or seven orders of magnitude, and the concentration fields of two SCIPUFF runs with identical input/settings looked darn near identical. Now that I know how to convert that to fL/L, however, I really only need to look at concentrations spanning the top two orders of magnitude, since the rest are below the detector precision of 1 fL/L, and now I’m noticing some differences in the fine-detail structure of the concentration fields. So I spent all afternoon starting some pairs of “identical” SCIPUFF runs, and so far it looks like I’m getting quite a bit of run-to-run variability. When I told AJ about it, he got rather alarmed, because he’s never seen SCIPUFF return non-identical results when using identical input/settings. I have no idea what this is going to do to my thesis, which is supposed to be done in just over two weeks. I guess I get to find out in the morning when I meet with Sue, and get to inform her of these troubling problems I’ve suddenly encountered. I’d like to have a few more plots when I show up in her office so we can better assess what the problem is, so tonight I’m finishing up the pairs of runs I started this afternoon, and will probably try to run a 3rd experiment on some of the stuff I did yesterday. Sitting in my office in Walker Building babysitting SCIPUFF is exactly how I wanted to spend a gorgeous 75-degree evening…
On the plus side, the air conditioning has been working properly in Walker Building since Monday or so. OPP made us close all our windows last Wednesday because they were going to turn on the A/C, but it didn’t really kick in until Monday. During that time my office was warm (78-80 degrees) and stuffy, but I’m on the cool side of the building — Vic’s office hit the century mark last week, which is ridiculous. It’s also very bad for computers, but since OPP doesn’t pay the bills to fix/replace heat-damaged computers, they’re not all that inclined to try to fix the problem. This building was constructed so shoddily back in the 70s; like I’ve mentioned before, it’s the worst climate-controlled building on campus.
My final exam in Atmospheric Dispersion was yesterday morning (it went pretty well, I thought), so now I’m officially DONE with my fourth semester of graduate school! It definitely doesn’t feel like I’ve been at Penn State four semesters already… With all of my class obligations now finished until fall, I can focus on research and my thesis.
To celebrate the end of the semester, I went to lunch with Mike & Chris from church, and one of Mike’s friends, at Cozy Thai Bistro. I hadn’t ever been there before, mostly because it’s at the complete other end of College Ave from our side of campus, but it was really good. I’d definitely rate it better than Viet Thai, the place right across Atherton St from Walker Building. I’ll definitely be back! Mmmmm, panang curry… And it was such a gorgeous day outside, I couldn’t help but take a few pictures of the spring scenes around campus on my walk back to Walker. 🙂 To top off the end of semester celebration, a few of us from meteo went to Mad Mex for a couple “happy hora” drinks, and then after stopping back at Walker to do a couple more SCIPUFF runs, I went over to Jacob’s to take in the Twins-White Sux game, which the Twins came from behind to win 7-4 in extras on Morneau’s monster shot. It’s always a good day when you can beat the White Trash. 🙂
The church softball season got off to a great start on Monday. We (SC E-Free) knocked off Penns Valley Community Church 7-2 in a pretty good defensive game. I think our team only had one or two errors, and PVCC only had two or three as well, which is a pretty low total for amateur softball, in my experience. We had 19 players, so I only played the first half of the game (Ben was the only one to play the entire game), and hit a weak groundout to the pitcher in my only plate appearance. Argh. On the plus side, though, I caught both fly balls that came my way out in left field (both from the same hitter, incidentally), so at least I was able to contribute in a good way. Since I earned the reputation of being a utility player last year, Adam wants to have a game where he has me play at least seven positions, haha! I’m lookin forward to that, and I really don’t care where I play as long as I can play.
I had to do a double-take when I checked the scores from last weekend’s Aussie rules football games, and saw that my Geelong Cats had annihilated the hapless Richmond Tigers by a tally of 222-65. In the three years I’ve been following the AFL now, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a team top 200 points. We’ll see if the Cats can keep it up this weekend against the undefeated West Coast Eagles.
I wonder if Caren’s new cat will be like this one…