Jan 2010, Part 2: AMS in Atlanta

And now it’s been another month without blogging. Sigh. Again, sorry about that. Spring break is almost upon us, and I’m still blogging about something I did six weeks ago. Time for another main highlight of January, complete with heaps of photos!
In mid January I went to Atlanta for the 90th Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), where I presented a paper in the 16th Conference on Air Pollution Meteorology. I had a week to get ready for the conference after returning to campus from Christmas break, and there was enough to do that I didn’t quite get my talk or my manuscript finished before I left for Atlanta. I think this was the first time I left for a conference without having my talk completely put together, prepared and practiced, and this actually caused me to stress a bit. And my talk wasn’t until Thursday the 21st, the last day of the conference, so I had plenty of time to simultaneously put off prepping and fret about it, but also enjoy being in Atlanta and hanging out with friends. In the end my presentation went really well though, I was happy with it and Sue was happy with it.
Originally I was going to fly down there on Sunday the 17th with all the other Penn Staters, but back in December the Department of Meteorology asked if any grad students would be willing to go down to Atlanta a couple days early to represent the Department at the AMS Career Fair during the AMS student conference the weekend leading up to the main conference. Basically, they decided that it’d be better to have grad students instead of undergrads man the table to talk to prospective students about our graduate program — a very wise decision, in my opinion. So Andrew & I volunteered for that duty. It was enjoyable to talk to so many students who either had applied to PSU this year or were thinking of applying next year and give them advice on how best I thought they could strengthen their applications. There was a fairly steady stream of visitors to our info table during both the Saturday and Sunday evening sessions. Andrew & I had a little bit of an adventure in trying to set up for the Career Fair on Saturday — the shipment with all the stuff for the Penn State table didn’t arrive at our hotel until close to 2:30 or 3pm, just 2-3 hours before the Career Fair started. That definitely had us nervous for awhile, as it was supposed to have gotten to the hotel the day before. It certainly would not have looked good for Penn State to have an empty table!
The hotel Andrew & I stayed at was the Omni Hotel at the CNN Center in downtown Atlanta, and which was right across the street from the Georgia World Congress Center, the site of the conference. At last year’s AMS conference in Phoenix, Alex & I stayed at a hotel that was a half-hour train ride away from the conference center, so it was pretty different being right across the street this year. (Of course, last year Alex & I were both pretty much paying our own way to the conference, and so stayed at a budget motel, whereas this year both Andrew & I had our entire trip to AMS paid for by Meteo & ARL, so a closer, nicer hotel was feasible. 🙂 And the view from our hotel room was pretty sweet too, a 4th floor view of Olympic Park and the Atlanta skyline.

Saturday the 16th was a very rainy day in Atlanta, but I spent most of the day hanging out with my friend Paul. I knew Paul from the State College E-Free Church, and I hadn’t seen him since he moved to Atlanta in summer 2008 after getting his Master’s in Acoustics. Paul took Andrew & I to lunch at The Varsity, a very famous fast-food joint. I believe it’s the largest fast-food restaurant in the U.S. — the place is enormous. Even at 2pm the place was absolutely packed too. Their trademark greeting (when you finally manage to get to the counter) is “What’ll ya have?!” I think I got a chili dog, chili cheeseburger, onion rings and a fried peach pie. They sure know how to fry food in the south!

We dropped Andrew off at the hotel after lunch (after which point the shipment for the PSU Career Fair table finally arrived, so Andrew set up the table by himself), then Paul & I went to the World of Coca-Cola. The World of Coke is a museum dedicated to all things Coca-Cola (which is headquartered in Atlanta): history, advertising, pop culture and art, a mini bottling plant, free samples of Coke-brand soft drinks from around the world, and of course a kitschy gift shop with more Coke-branded items than I’ve ever seen before in my life. Admission was $15, and I’d say it was a fair price. A small first part of the tour was guided, but the vast majority of the tour was self-guided. Paul & I even got pictures with the Coke Bear (which had a silly, stupid grin on its face), and got a chance to hold Olympic torches. So that was pretty cool. In the taste test area, they had “totems” set up for each continent, each having eight different Coke-bottled soft drinks, and each brand labeled with the country of origin. Some of these other soft drinks were quite good, while some others were pretty bad. In this blogger’s humble opinion, the highest percentage of good drinks were at the Africa totem (South America had some pretty good ones too), while the highest percentage of poor-tasting drinks were at the Europe totem (I think Fanta was the only one I liked). It was a pretty cool 2-3 hours at World of Coke, I’m really glad I went. And I’ve noticed that ever since I went to the World of Coke, I’ve been much more inclined to drink Coca-Cola. Hmmmm…

After doing the Career Fair table for a couple hours, Paul came back into the city to pick up Jeff [Frame] & I (Jeff was in town for the student conference and career fair, trying to recruit students to the University of Illinois, where he just started teaching), to go get dinner and watch the Colts-Ravens playoff game at a Mexican restaurant up in Buckhead, a northern suburb. Then we finished watching the game at Paul’s apartment, so it was cool to see where he lived.
Before getting picked up by Paul, however, I may have gotten hustled. I was walking to Paul’s car in the rain, when a guy came up to me asking if I was from the area. I said no, but he asked if I could help him out anyway. My initial reaction was to ignore him as I did all the other numerous panhandlers in Atlanta, but something about this guy seemed legit. I had a feeling like I was supposed to help him. He told me the story of what happened to him — something about his car getting broken into, then having to wait two hours for the cops to show up, and now in need of $10 for gas to get back home. He gave me all sorts of reasons as to why I should trust him, and promised that he’d pay me back. I asked him how he’d do that, and he said he’d take down my name and cell phone number and meet me at the CNN Center Starbucks at 9am the next morning. I told him I didn’t have a $10 bill, so he asked if I could spare a $20. Like I said earlier, I just had a feeling that I was supposed to help this person. Anyway, the next morning I waited at the Starbucks for a good 45 minutes with no sign of the guy. So maybe he wasn’t being genuine about his situation or his need, or his intention to pay me back. Or perhaps he really was in need, but for whatever reason couldn’t make it to the CNN Center the next morning. Maybe the reason he didn’t call me back was that the piece of paper on which I wrote my phone number got soaked in the rain. Who knows. Whatever the case, I hope my $20 met a genuine need of his.
So after waiting around at Starbucks for awhile, I hopped on the MARTA (the metro/subway) up to Buckhead to go to church with Paul at Peachtree Presbyterian Church. Peachtree Pres is such a huge church, they have multiple church services going on simultaneously. When I was there, there was a traditional service happening in the main building, while Paul & I went to the contemporary service in the building across the street. They even had a couple traffic cops on the street so that parishoners could cross the street between buildings, and turn into/out of the parking lots. And for the service we went to, there were multiple remote locations in that building in which one could view the service and watch the sermon (such as a young children’s/families area). It was probably the biggest church I’ve ever attended. Then after church Paul & I drove back to downtown Atlanta to watch the Vikings-Cowboys playoff game at a place called Stats. Stats is unique in that it’s one of the only establishments in the world to have a table-top tap — some of the tables have their own taps, where you can pour your own beer. It keeps track of how many ounces you pour yourself, and then generates a bill when you’re done. Pretty slick! It was also a fun place to watch the Vikings dominate Dallas. 🙂
On Monday night the 18th, Harris Corporation threw their annual GOES (Geostationary Orbiting Earth Satellites) party. Last year it was at a hotel in downtown Phoenix, but this year it was at Atlanta’s Georgia Aquarium, just on the other side of Olympic Park from our hotel. The theme, naturally, was “Harris GOES Fishing.” The GOES party is awesome because of the free admission, unlimited free food and drinks for conference attendees, but this year there was the extra attraction of wandering around the aquarium. It was fantastic, the whole aquarium was open to us! While there I ran into my friend Laura (both a Penn State and Australia connection there, bit of a story), who then was about to introduce me to her friend Monica, when Monica & I laughed and said, “Oh, we already know each other — we went to high school together!” Yep, there were two graduates of Cumberland High School at the AMS Conference for the second year in a row. Small world! It was fun catching up with both of them. I meant to get a photo of all three of us, but there were so many people everyone knew at the party and so we got distracted.

Overall throughout the conference there were a fair number of interesting talks, and there was only session all week I skipped out of due to a complete lack of talks that interested me, which was on Thursday afternoon, the last day. I spent the majority of my time in either the Air Pollution Meteorology conference, Energy conference, or the Probability & Statistics conference, and then going to scattered talks that caught my eye in random other conferences. One of the highlights of the conference for me was going to hear Dr John Christy (U of Alabama-Huntsville, Alabama State Climatologist) speak on the effects of modernizing historical climate network temperature stations in Alabama. The main gist of his talk was that microclimates rule the roost when it comes to temperature observations, and stations a mere 600 meters apart can exhibit a bias of a couple degrees relative to each other on average. That makes a big difference, especially when many of the stations that have been going into the climate record are near buildings or pavement, which leads to warmer observed temperatures than they actually should be. The room got pretty full for his talk, and it was quite the interesting presentation. I went up to him later, introduced myself, and told him that I really appreciate the work that he & Roy Spencer (also of UAH) do with regards to issues related to climate change research (and John Christy’s emphasis on getting good data and observations into the climate record). He said he doesn’t think too many people at AMS appreciate what he has to say, but I told him that there are people like me who do. So anyway, that was a bit of a thrill for me. 🙂
Getting home from the conference was kind of interesting too. Fog delayed our departure from ATL on Friday morning the 22nd, so that our connection in IAD was really tight. We landed at gate A2, and were immediately hustled to the front of the line at gate A1 to go straight onto the plane to SCE, the doors of which were closed as soon as we were on board. We were literally in the terminal for no more than a minute — that’s the tightest connection I’ve ever made. Needless to say my luggage did not make the connection with me, but was instead delivered to my apartment the next morning.