Rowing Across an Ocean of Contours

Today I'm very happy to feature a guest post from my friend Angie Pendergrass, a PhD student in the Atmospheric Sciences department here at UW. She's got the mother of all side-projects: using her data analysis and climate modeling skills to help predict ocean currents for a group of crazy brave rowers...

Imagine you're rowing a boat across the ocean. You can't row very fast, just 3 knots if you try your hardest (that's a little slower than walking speed.) You have 4000 nautical miles nautical miles of sea to cover. Scattered across the ocean surface, you know there are some favorable currents and some eddies, spinning whirlpools of water about 50 nautical miles across, with current up to at least one knot. They can help you if you can ride them favorably, or they can suck -- a lot -- if they're against you. You really need to know what these eddies are doing!

Luckily you have a team of weather forecasters and a navigator ashore helping you out. There are actually some guys doing this row, called OAR Northwest. They set out from Dakar, Senegal in late January for Miami, Florida, and now they're halfway across the middle of the Atlantic; check them out at oarnorthwest.com. Your guest-author is their lead weather forecaster.

So now you should be super excited to hear that the National Center for Environmental Prediction (part of NOAA) runs a model of the ocean that diagnoses the ocean surface currents. Great, this is perfect! Let's take a look!

Viz: Rain in Seattle? Really?

Today I'm happy to feature a cross-post from my good friend and fellow graduate student, Nicholas Hunt-Walker. He's written a fun post about data and weather, and has some great looking visualizations! The post is reproduced below, but check out his awesome blog: The Roda, The Stars, The Lessons, The Life

Take it away, Nick:

This is my face most days...

Before I moved out here to Seattle for graduate school I was repeatedly warned about how rainy it tends to be out here.  One person even described it as "London-esque".  However, when I first visited back in March 2010 (this becomes relevant later), not only was it barely raining, but it was absolutely gorgeous for each of the 4 days I was here.  I left here thinking, "where's all this rain people were talking about?  It's beautiful here!"

Two years and three months later, I can confirm the well-known Seattle drear.  It feels like it's cloudy more often than not, and it's nearly always wet.  ALWAYS!  Am I just suffering from confirmation bias, or is Seattle's weather always just generally crappy?  Well, being the scientist that I am, I sought to answer these interesting and personally-relevant questions.