Blog: Jackson Tan's Maldives research
Final post09 November 2011 And so here I am in the Male International Airport, waiting to board my plane back home. It was a wild ride on the 50-seater from Gan to Male, though I should've expected that from radar and satellite images revealing intense convective activity there over the past few days. The last three weeks were a completely enriching experience for me. My PhD deals with data analysis and modelling, something that requires me to crunch numbers behind a computer screen in the relative comfort of my office, with a cup of tea on my desk and high-speed Internet just an Alt-Tab away. Being in this field campaign has been an intense crash course on field work, an immersion into a wholly different style of research and research life - an invaluable lesson that can never be replicated in the normal course of a PhD education. It is one thing to sit in an office on a rainy day, studying cloud satellite data of the last ten years to decipher convective patterns; it is another to be down in the radar truck, staring at the sweeping radar scans and wondering if that huge stratiform cloud will swerve away from the site and avert a potential wet ride home. Being a US-led effort, I got to witness how other organisations and universities work, how such huge projects possess a number of components managed by different principal investigators, and how they all come together. An international campaign also meant the involvement of many people I only knew by name but never met in person. In fact, I was told that such campaigns often bring researchers in the same field but scattered over the world into one location. I guess a conference will do the same, but the extended cooperation demanded by field-work gives it a far more personal touch. I have met Robert A. Houze (or 'Boss Bob', as the friendly resort staff likes to call him). He is an authority in atmospheric science, having written a comprehensive textbook entitled Cloud Dynamics (which I have read during the beginnings of my PhD), as well as a review paper on mesoscale convective systems. A rather reserved figure at dinner table, his intelligence shines through when I read his reports and listen to his discussions. And there's Chidong Zhang, the head of the DYNAMO field campaign, and an expert on the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO). It took me a while to realise that this is the C. Zhang who wrote the review paper that practically taught me everything I know about the MJO. In hindsight, that was most natural, but after Bob I wasn't expecting another big name to sprout up on that tiny island. But it doesn't end there. Beside the core scientists and technicians, there were numerous visiting scientists hovering around the fresh radar images, contrasting them with satellite images and modelling forecasts. It was thrilling to hear them point out the significance and connections that were so obvious once I became aware of them. On this I can't help feeling like John Watson before Sherlock Holmes. One of these experts is Brian Mapes. An absolutely brilliant character, it was unfortunate that our time in Gan overlapped only by a few days. I would've loved to converse in detail about his paper on the building blocks of convection, an idea that began to fascinate me just before I left for this field campaign. And then there is Eric Maloney, an editor for the Journal of Climate and a thoroughly friendly guy who imparted to me much about the atmospheric events we were experiencing. Dinner table discussions with him were something I looked forward to every day.
Images from last days in Maldives.
On my last few days, Richard Johnson came in. I wasn't aware of it at first, but here was the author who proposed a third mode of convective state in terms of cloud types, one that is perhaps crucial to my PhD project. Of course, a field campaign doesn't function without students and postdocs, and it was delightful to meet them and find out what their expertise was and what research life in other environments and fields was like. But above all, there is Courtney Schumacher, who gave me the opportunity to work at her radar. A name that I already knew from my project (she was co-author of a paper that lays the foundation for it), she put me in a position where I could make a genuine contribution and taught me the essentials of fieldwork. Ultimately, a huge thanks must go to the Centre of Excellence and my supervisor Christian Jakob, without whom I would not have even been aware of this campaign. So, as I write this last post, it is also a farewell from this amazing experience. I will certainly miss the excitement of seeing instant radar products before my eyes, the intellectual discussions with the best researchers of my field, and also the easy-going and amiable Maldivians. |
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