Nerd Take-over of San Francisco - Day 3

Wed. Dec. 12
I am done with my poster presentation! Yes!! It went pretty well. But I will start from the beginning of the day first. As usual, I did not get out of bed until about 30 minutes after the alarm went off. I rode on the bike in the health club this morning and it made me realize two things: 1. I miss riding my road bike, and 2. I have strong preference toward the skinny saddle on my road bike versus the overly wide and cushy ones that are on stationary bikes.
So, anyway … I was a little later getting to the conference than I would have liked but oh well. I was pretty tired today and found myself falling asleep twice this morning (even after buying some coffee). During the morning break, Erica and Ian found me so I could show my poster to Ian. It was good to show it to him and he gave me some pointers on what I should talk about. Then I went to some talks regarding snow. One was about how snow is melting about 2 weeks earlier in the Colorado Rockies than it was 25 years ago. Another was about the retreat of glaciers in the American West. Here is something interesting – glacier melt is due to a combination of climate and local topography. For example, a small glacier that is in the shade of surrounding slopes won’t melt very much, even under global warming. But big glaciers are mostly open to sunlight and so they melt a lot each year as temperatures rise. So, large glaciers are retreating at rapid rates, but it will be a long time before all the small glaciers melt. Interesting. The last talk of the morning was about glaciers in a mountain range in Uganda, and the pictures were really cool because there are some weird plants there.
During lunch there was a special talk by Susan Solomon. She was one of the instrumental scientists involved in discovering why ozone is strongly depleted each winter over Antarctica. More recently, she was a chair of an IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) group and was in Oslo yesterday receiving part of the Nobel Peace Prize for this work (along with Al Gore). Her talk was very interesting – she talked a lot about the ozone hole and current research related to it, as well as some about climate change and policy.
After the talk it was time for my poster! I started at 1:30 and was busy until 5:45 with people coming by and asking questions and looking at it. I enjoy explaining my research, and it is even kind of fun to answer questions and to discuss with people certain aspects of the research. I got a few good ideas from people. Scott came by and said he liked the poster. He is funny because he cannot help but interrupt when I am talking about my research. He just gets so excited about it that he has to interject. He did this a couple times and kept apologizing but I don’t mind because he knows better than me what is most important about this study and is really good at communicating it. One man came by who works with a branch of NSF that awards student grants for international travel. So now I actually have a practical avenue to pursue for going to Brazil!! If I am going to continue studying the Amazon, it really makes sense for me to go there. I would love to see the rainforest, but even going to Brazil to collaborate with the people who make observations would be instrumental. So we will see, but I am pretty sure I will be applying for one of those grants. Another highlight of the session was toward the end, a woman who Scott had introduced me to and works at Rutgers walked by and said goodbye, and she said she voted for my poster as the best student poster. That is cool, because I kind of felt like the poster was inadequate because of how preliminary all of my results are. But I guess that even though the results are rough, I have put a lot of thought (1-1/2 years!) into the science behind the research. So overall it was a really good afternoon!
I was exhausted though, after being on my feet all afternoon and talking to people the whole time. So I treated myself to a frappachinno at one of the million Starbucks between the convention center and my hotel. I felt like I deserved some thing like that after all of the work I have done this semester. It felt good when I finished my project last Wed. for 604, and it felt good when I finished my poster at 9 AM Sunday, but finishing the presentation made it official that all of the work of this fall is done. I am so relieved! And, I am very happy that it ended on a high note.
I got back to my room at 6:20 and just sat on the chaise lounge (fancy) until 6:40, when I had to leave for a meeting for the LBA-MIP. Haha, lots of anacronyms! LBA is the Large-scale Biosphere experiment in Amazonia. It was a NASA-funded program that involved the establishment of a handful of observations stations throughout the Amazon River basin. The funding has run out, but there is still a lot of research following up on the project (like mine). MIP stands for Model Inter-comparison. It is common in this field for there to be several different models that all try to do the same thing. There are a lot of vegetation models like the one I use, and the MIP basically involves all these modelers running their models for certain locations in the Amazon and then comparing them all to observations and to each other. That way you can see what are the strengths and weaknesses of each model and then all of the models can be improved based on these results. That is the gist of it.
The meeting was not too interesting, except that Scott said I should go to the next LBA-MIP conference, which will be in Manaus, Brazil next July … sweet!! ☺ Now all I need to do is hire Chris as my assistant. After the meeting I went out with Nick, Brad, and Erica for a drink. I had a $15 margarita – but I earned it, dammit! Funny story – last night my research group went out for dinner but I couldn’t go because of the section dinner I went to. But Nick said that Scott brought me up and felt bad that I couldn’t be there, and also that I have been working so hard on my poster – so they toasted me … haha, it is kind of funny. At least I was missed. ☺
Ok … time for bed! It is 12:45, and tomorrow I am sleeping in until 7:00!! Woohoo! Goodnight.