Updates for 2015

Happy Earth day!

Yes, it’s that time of year again, Earth Day! A day devoted to celebrating progress we’ve made protecting the environment. I’m not much of an environmental activist, but as a climate scientist I guess I have a innate fascination with the natural world so Earth day still means something to me.

In other news, my fiancé and I recently moved from Miami to Raleigh, North Carolina. In Florida I was working at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) with Dr. Brian Mapes. I’m really going to miss working with Dr. Mapes and the other people in his research group, but on the bright side we don’t have to live in Miami anymore, because… Miami sucks.

Our move to Raleigh was because I received a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. In my proposal, I wanted to work with Dr. Anantha Aiyyer, at North Carolina State University Department of Marine Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (MEAS), which why we are now living here.

Dr. Anantha is an expert in the area of African Easterly Waves (AEW), which often act as seed disturbances for Atlantic Tropical cyclones. The basic gist of the project that I will be working on is to get a sense of how AEW activity might change in response to elevated CO2 using a super-parameterized climate model that has shown success in simulating AEWs. This project is going to easily use over a million core hours on the NCAR Yellowstone super computer and produce 10’s of terabytes of data! I’m really excited to get going on this project. If you’d like to know more about this project feel free to contact me! I love talking about climate science and atmospheric modeling!

So far we are both absolutely loving Raleigh! We live in between NC State and the downtown are. We’ve decided to get rid of one of our cars and just bike 90% of the time because everything is close by, and the drivers are very aware of cyclists. I couldn’t find any actual statistics to compare the number of accidents or fatalities, but I definitely feel safer biking around Raleigh than I ever did biking around Miami.

There is so much good beer here! I was also surprised to find that people are really nice here. Maybe it’s a southern thing, but it’s so much better than Miami. In Miami I could never sit at a bar by myself and just start talking to the people around me, but in Raleigh that happens regularly. The weather has also been gorgeous, without the heat and humidity we had gotten used to in Miami.

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