Snow is cool! ❄️ @cryospheroid@scholar.social

#introduction
Hello everyone! I’m a PhD student studying atmospheric physics; Arctic snow, at the moment, to be more specific. Most of my work is of the computational/data analysis variety, though I’m working both with data from remote sensing observations and from models. I spend much of my time wrangling large datasets with Python, but thankfully, I enjoy doing it (most of the time)!

my programming fumble of the day: messing up an array operation so badly that I accidentally tried to make a 30,000x30,000-element array, causing my laptop to hang for a solid 10 minutes

how is it that all of my successes only serve to make my impostor syndrome stronger!?

anyway, I’m glad I have an advisor who is concerned about my physical well-being, that’s always nice!

another funny thing about being the Free Food Guy in my group is that now, every time I come back from travel, everyone in the group starts telling me about all the cool free meals I missed while I was away

literally had my advisor say this to me this morning, and it was funny because I heard the same from my mother the day before! I guess that’s what I get for developing a reputation for being the Free Food Guy in my research group

my mother, while I’m travelling for research stuff: “make sure you’re eating”
my PhD advisor, while I’m travelling for research stuff: “make sure you’re eating”

Just a note that OCO-3’s predecessor, OCO-2, has similar measurement capabilities, but a different orbit, and OCO-3 has a better pointing mechanism (among other things). The overlap in the two missions will be helpful for calibrating the instruments against each other, too!

The other cool thing about OCO-3 is that it can measure the light emitted by plants undergoing photosynthesis, which allows us to quantify how much CO2 is being absorbed by plants. The OCO-3 orbit gives particularly good coverage of regions of the Earth where a lot of vegetation grows (eg. the Amazon).

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 (OCO-3) is an instrument that will be making observations of CO2 over a large portion of the globe from the International Space Station. It’ll be able to measure CO2 at different times of the day in the regions it observes (thanks to the geometry of the ISS orbit), and it’s also able to capture detailed snapshots of CO2 over regions of interest.

Here’s a fact sheet (PDF) for the curious: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/fact_sheets/oco3.pdf

So glad to see that OCO-3 arrived! I’m very hyped to see the new science that comes out of this one!

I’m extremely hyped about OCO-3!

They’re putting an instrument on the ISS to help measure CO2 on Earth!

Here’s a nice article about it: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48150645

I think the real issue is that they said “what do you study” and I mumbled something about the atmosphere and snow, and they said “where?” and I said “in the Arctic”, when in hindsight they were most likely inquiring about the country where my school is located.

It all went fine in the end, but I was a bit bewildered by the experience

Just heard from a relative of mine that saying “I research snow in the Arctic” or something along those lines was something people would say when they were being facetious about their work or trying to avoid being asked about what they do? I have no idea whether or not this is true, it sounds fake but my relative swears it’s a thing.

If it isn’t a lie, then that explains why the people at customs did a bunch of prying last time I travelled for research...

There’s only one letter separating “grad school” and “grade school”... really makes you think...

These things may or may not only seem profound to me because I’m still a bit jet-lagged after a trip I returned from several days ago

Even the phrase “grad school” itself is sort of an oxymoron now that I think about it; “grad” implies you’re done with your studies while “school” implies you’re not.

Grad school is a strange sort of liminal space. We’re not quite students, but not quite faculty either.

Finished! More or less!

Now I need to write some emails, oh well