Life of a programmer

Today I spent a cumulative 6 hours programming. And I am tired. So I've decided to skip today's jog, post a short blog entry, and perhaps watch a movie or just go to bed early. I am happy to now possess a regional radar reflectivity archive from the 12 March 2006 major mid-west tornado outbreak. I do not have a way (yet) to animate the images (they are in PNG format, which I gather is still relatively new), but I can scroll through them myself via the windows picture viewer. Amazing set of imagery -- you can easily see the *triple* initiation off the dryline in eastern Kansas, watch the storms organize on the micro- and meso-scales into a line of supercells, and follow them as they march east across Missouri into Illinois. I managed to save the 00Z SGF and OUN soundings as proximity soundings to the event. Later I'd like to go back and grab the upper-air maps valid at 00Z (and if I can find it, the 24-h and 12-h previous ETA and GFS forecasts). So, after 6 hrs of programming, I now possess 289 .png images of regional wsr-88d reflectivity (centered on EAX).

In other news:

- My MM5 simulation over the weekend evidenly made it to 43200 sec (720 mins, or 12 hrs). What I dont understand is the stupid errors I get from the Boomer queue, nor do I actually see any detail in the output (granted, Ivan was still in a formative stage, and he was not in my model domain during this 12-hr run). I'm interested to continue the run, and perhaps also output cloud-water or something else useful. The sfc temp and all upper-level plots are relatively meaningless since the gradients of said properties in the tropics are, well, relatively low. I did see that a pretty stout upper anti-cyclone existed ~ 500km to the west of Ivan. I wonder if that is real or a fictious model error of some kind. Stay tuned.

- I've been offered a "visiting lectureship" at the University of Graz in Austria for the winter 2006 academic term. Sweet! :) Anyone been to Graz before, or want to share your insights? I see they have a rather neat clock tower in the middle of town. And there's also a flight from Graz to Antalya, Turkey, that runs at least once a week.

- Only 11 more weeks on Barbados. Wow. Time flies when you're having fun ;)

- Tomorrow I will venture into town and get my hair cut (read: get my head shaved almost clean). Meant to do it today but got distracted by programming (you know how it is, you get started on something and really want to finish it).

- More details on the programming: I started out in Fortran 77, being my most comfortable language, but the system call routine sucks in F77. So I switched to Python, a less-friendly language but more robust than Fortran. After hunting around on the web for insights on how to run a loop in Python (you use a "For" statement), I got things to work. As posted above, I am the proud possessor of 289 radar images from one of the more (the most?) prolific tornado outbreaks in my lifetime.

- I'm a little excited about the NCAA tournament, mainly b/c I can watch it on TV here via the CBS affiliate from Erie, PA. Go Tar Heels, and Go Sooners! :) My wish-pick? UNC. My realistic pick? Duke

Enjoy the week. And sorry for the 8-day delay between posts. I've been kinda busy (applying for the job to Austria, coding, running the MM5, etc.)