August 13, 2009 – Home again
Housekeeping
I just finished and posted an old chase summary from June 5, the day I totaled my car. It’s a long entry, as you might expect.
I also wrote an entry for the infamous June 12 Norman tornado.
My project
My summer project was a huge success and it came out really well. The final product was an eight-minute presentation for Science on a Sphere, titled Cooking Up A Storm. It walks the audience through the atmospheric setup for a typical severe weather day.
I showed it to a few tour groups and to my peers, and it was received very well.
You can view a rendering of the video or how it appears on the sphere. There is more information and a download on the SOS site.
End of the internship
After all the excitement of chase season, my internship ended uneventfully enough. I spent a lot of time with my newfound friends. To begin a typical evening, we would all come back to the apartments and fix ourselves dinner. Then we would get together at dusk and play volleyball or basketball until we were exhausted. Then we’d take showers and all get together to watch DVDs of The Office. It was a fun routine.
We did a lot of fun things on weekends too. We went to Oklahoma City for the Fourth of July weekend to go to White Water Bay and see fireworks. We played laser tag at HeyDay, and went to see the Oklahoma City RedHawks, a minor-league baseball team. There was also the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Oh yeah, and my mom visited as well and brought me a car so I could drive home. I love you, Mom.
Silver Spring
The final week of my internship was spent at NOAA headquarters in Silver Spring, MD. I drove there in three days, simultaneously enjoying the beautiful scenery of the southeast and cursing Tennessee drivers.
Presentation week went really well. The presentations dragged on and on, but that was expected. I met up with a lot of people I’d met during orientation week a year and a half earlier. We went into D.C. twice to sightsee and to nosh on some Legal Sea Food.
Thanks
Where to begin? Thank you first to Daphne Thompson for being a great first-time mentor and for lending her melodious voice for the narration of my SOS video. Thank you also to Keli Tarp for organizing the Hollings program in Norman for all eight of us; she did a bang-up job. Thank you also to the folks from the NSSL IT department, especially James Murnan for helping me with the video production and sound effect stuff. Finally, thank you to NOAA’s Ernest F. Hollings scholarship program and all its organizers, like Pai Moua and Chantell Haskins. This was a great opportunity and learning experience.
I wish the best of luck to all my friends and peers! In no particular order: Darren, T-mas, Justin, Stephanie, Madison, Liz, Kristen, Hannah, Lauren, Travis, Astrid, Doug, Jeff, Preson, Alex, Jonathan, Lindsey – you are all great.
I wouldn’t trade this summer for any other.
Where to go from here?
Senior year begins in two weeks, and I will have to get back into that routine again. I may post some more pictures or videos as I go through and process them. Hopefully some tropical storms spin our way so I will be able to blog about that! Then comes the fun winter weather and the infamous Storrs Wind Vortex To Hell. In the meantime, the blog will only be updated intermittently.
Thank you for reading!
