ERAD2010 - participants

The deadline for early registrations has come.
I wonder how much this event is impacting on my life. Well, I am addicted to it.

I look everyday, several times, at the list of people who registered. People I admire so much. I know their work, I know their passion. Some of them are my favourites, my models.

Some of them are new to me but "old" in the branch, I am so glad to discover them. Some of them are students. This edition is dedicated to them, to their courage to follow a scientist career in difficult times; and to women in radar science. If I could bring closer to 50-50 the percentage in gender participation, I could say I have accomplished one target.

I am going back now to contemplate again the list of great radar scientist people that will reach and enrich ERAD. I can not work too much these months for my own life, but I know that ERAD will bring something good to many people, and this is the most important reason to do things.

Black Sea El Ninho

Strong temperature differences in the marine waters on the Western Basin of the Black Sea. Wind is from N, 13 km/h. Air Temperature at Constanta is -17C.


Satellite IR EUMETSAT image from sat24.com

ERAD 2010 - Merry Christmas !

www.erad2010.org

Bow echo

A reflectivity image with a bow echo, C band, and a sattelite image, visible low resolution, with the clear spot behind the bowecho where the rear inflow jet is, red arrow, and a lot of rolls in the southern part or Romania, nice to act as local enhancers.
Last evening Bucharest had a severe storm with 40 mm in less than one hour, the fears are if again the storms will be severe for Bucharest or not.

Birds on radar

While satellite in visible (EUMETSAT) shows clear skies (top image), radar shows plenty of echoes from birds and insects after the Sun rise (bottom); no, it wasn't dust. The south-eastern radar of Romania, with big lakes and the Danube Delta, has a lot of "noise" during summer, but sometimes we can easily monitor low level circulations due to these tracers. Well, sometimes birds can mislead the forecaster !

Gust front

The red arrow points toward an outflow from a convective cell. The thin line is the leading edge of the diverging outflow, it is called "gust front".

(visible channel, satellite images, 15 minutes apart - EUMETSAT- northern part of Moldova - Romania)

Cloud streets

I am reading now some papers on horizontal convective roll clouds, street clouds and other similar shallow structures and how they can interact with other phenomena like the sea breeze.

The first image is about what an ignorant could think about a cloud street; the second image is what radar iamges show very often but people do not know what they are looking at (convective rolls) , the third one is a nice one from satellite Terra, with streets over the Black Sea, the last one is an airplane view of the street structure, maybe the closer to our sense of Nature. True. Meteorology is a lucky science where concepts get to a structure that can be "seen".

I struggle to find a language that can ease the process of learning, to avoid difficult math and to build concepts beyond equations. But... there are concepts that reveal only with hard work and math.

The two last days I have advanced only two pages in my reading and my conclusion is that many forecasters might have only "cartoons" and nice images in their minds... and do their jobs in the same way a gipsy "musicant" can play violin without ever seeing scores. In the same way, there are composers that never played a piece. But art and science have a different consequence of "amateurism". Art is gentle with amateurism and kitsch.

How deep do we want to go in our profession depends on how much we need a "profession" or we just want to remain "amateurs". Is the difference between a "profession" and a "job".

Of course, amateurs can be much better payed, jobs can have a role in society, but... the real advance of our society has been done through the long effort of people conceptualizing, working hard, creating new theories for days and years in a row.

There is a "natural" selection among professionals: the real ones remain for research at any price, the amateurs go for better "jobs".

I remember a cross moment in my life when I had to choose between arts and physics, and I understand now that arts wouldn't have been enough for me, that I am a better artist now, as an amateur artist, than the professional artist I would have been without my professional work in science.