Last week started off with welcoming my summer student, Ms. Huiwen Chuang, from the University of Michigan. She will work with me for 10 weeks this summer to analyze water vapor variability using AIRS and MLS data as well as IPCC model simulations. She spun up quickly and impressed me with the nice plots of AIRS water vapor time series for four ocean basins on the third day after her arrival in JPL. I expect a productive summer for her and me.

Prof. Richard Johnson visited JPL on June 18 and gave a seminar on “The Diurnal Cycle, Mesoscale Boundary Layer Circulations, and the MJO”. He is a renowned meteorologist and atmospheric scientist on tropical convection and dynamics. He led the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA COARE) in 1992-93 and produced many valuable datasets to study tropical convection. My Ph.D. thesis was benefited from the data generated from TOGA COARE. I ran the mesoscale model (MM5) to simulate deep convective events during TOGA COARE and compared the modeled results to the field observations. Prof. Johnson stressed the diurnal variability of tropical convection and the importance of capturing the full diurnal cycle using remote sensing techniques.