A special, short two weeks

A special two weeks has been shortly passed. I’m writing this post in Doha international airport, where I’m on the way back home. After I got interested in tropical convection and modeling of it in my graduate school period, I have always been wished to attend a field experiment that aims to observe clouds. Simply I wanted to see what I’m trying to represent by thousands of lines of Fortran (a computer programing language) code, so that I could have some feelings about it. Sometimes I could see real clouds in the flight during travels, or from pictures of them. Apparently, they were not enough.

Since my arrival, the Gan Island has experienced a variety of atmospheric conditions from a very dry day, when I wished to see one cloud, to a wet day when I had to ride the bike through falling rain. During this period, I had been surrounded by a plenty of observations of cloud and the status of the atmosphere, stimulating scientific discussions about them, and, most importantly, the real tropical clouds that I could see by my eyes. After the special two weeks, I realize that I’m not as comfortable as I expected. This is because my current feeling about tropical convection tells me that modeling of tropical convection is much more challenging than I ever imagined. This means modeling and prediction of the MJO is challenging too because tropical convection plays a central role in the dynamics and physics of the MJO. Nonetheless, I found again that the tropical convection was so much fascinating to me that I couldn’t think of anything else. I’ll challenge.

I’m leaving, but I believe the DYNAMO scientists will continue the great work in the Gan Island, and other islands and ships in the Indian Ocean. Before I leave, I’d like to write names of some DYNAMO scientists. I’d like to thank Chuck, Paquita, Scott, and Courtney for their kind introductions to instruments. They were just great and it was truly fruitful. I’ll also try to remember the stimulating discussions with Brian, Paquita, Chidong, and Eric. Paquita, Courtney, Chidong and Chuck guided me to make a small contribution to DYNAMO field campaign, which I’m proud of. Finally, I appreciate my advisor Adam for his support on my special, short two weeks.