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Also known as the page about being a weather and space nerd.
(Complete with pictures!)
We'll start with the weather part first.
Hurricane Irma knocked out our power, and sparked my love for watching hurricanes. A few years later, I wondered if learning about other severe weather would help me deal with my storm anxiety. The phrase from the recent(ish) tornado movie Twisters, "You don't run from your fears, you ride them." proved true for me. If a storm is headed my way, expect me to be glued to radar, the National Weather Service, and possibly out storm chasing. The storms don't inspire fear anymore, they bring excitment.
I'm still mostly self-studied, on top of working as a field tech for the mesonet. I started with this fun book called "Weather Analysis and Forecasting Handbook (1st edition)", read through MetEd's site amosgst others, google'd a lot, asked a bunch of questions and work in the field! That's not everything, but it's a decent overview of how I'm studying.
While my apartment balcony isn't the most ideal spot for it, I do have a home weather station that I check daily, even if it's not quite as sophisticated as the stations i work with. It's unfortunately not a wifi-capable model, so it's not linked to WeatherUnderground or anything similar, but eventually, espeically when I've got a better site for one, I plan to get a new one and connect it. The model I have now does track and store data, so it's still useful. When Helene came through Georgia, we just got the eye in Athens (where I lived at the time), but I did record a wind gust of 17mph. There's a chance that it could have been higher, but I'd moved the station to a slightly more secure location that didn't get the full brunt of things.
Weather patterns fascinate me, the way that the atmosphere interacts with Earth (and other planets too, we'll get there) and how that can cause thin little clouds to massive hurricanes, or turn air into spinning columns of dirt, debries and water, to name a couple examples of why. But like I've said, I wasn't always a huge fan of storms. Hearing thunder rolling through used to spike my heart rate from anxiety, not from excitement. The why is a little hard to pin down, it might have been the loudness, but it might have simply been that I didn't know why it was happening, or what the loud storm was about to do, and if that was going to put me in danger. Now, I do know how to find out what it's doing, if it's dangerous, how to see where it's going and that made the sound of thunder comforting, not terrifying.
What's nice about weather - and meteorology as a whole - is that a BS in CS is actually incredibly relevant. It's not enough as a degree to be a forecaster - and quite frankly, I don't want to be the person on TV talking about the upcoming weather, though I respect the people who can very much - but it's enough to provide a foundation for working with the behind-the-scenes aspect. Modeling in particular is now a computer heavy field, becuase the models we use today are done via computer analysis of patterns and known factors, not just by hand anymore. GFS, ECMWF, ICON, WRF - those are all models used in various ways thoughout the careers that might be summed up by "about weather".
I mentioned on my About page that I go storm chasing on occasion. I've honestly lost count of how many times now, and so far several of them have resulted in some truly spectacular pictures. Some of them have been just fun but to some extent, a "bust" on that front. It didn't make my desire to go again any colder, though, just gave me more reasons to go again and again. Eventually, I'd like to get a weather station that I can attach to my car and feed the data to the NWS. It would be somewhat redundant at home, since it would be stationary a good chunk of the time, but mobile mesonets are a pretty common thing anyways, so having a very, very tiny one (ha) wouldn't hurt.
Below are going to be some pictures I've taken from various chases, or when I've just been out and about and snapped a good picture. I've got pleennnntty more of them, but I can only post so many before it starts slowing the site down.
I made some weather puns somewhere on this page...if you spotted them, I hope it at least makes you chuckle.
Some cool storm pictures that I took! (yes, me!)
(Right click the images and open them in a new tab for full resolution.)
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And now, to the stars!
Remember how I said that the Earth's sky wasn't the only one I'm fascinated by?
Here's the space part of it all.
When I was in third grade, my Halloween costume was me as an astronaut. In fourth grade, I attended Space Camp as a field trip at school, and while I don't remember a lot about that age, one of the clearest times was going to Space Camp. I don't know why I gave up on that dream, in truth - but I think part of it was to do with needing glasses, and being told, at some point, that those alone meant I wouldn't ever be able to do that job. I'm not sure who may have told me, but I think that was the begining of setting that on the shelf at the time.
I'm not sure if you'll be familar with the crew of Artemis II. In 2026, they went behind the moon, for the first time humans have done so in 50 years. And one of the astronauts - Christina Koch - was wearing glasses in the cabin of the Integrity.
I hadn't mentioned it yet, but I need glasses to see properly. My vision is correctable to near if not fully 20/20 with them, but as a kid, I didn't know that things would change to include people who don't have perfect vision when they were born.
She wasn't the only astronaut wearing glasses in space that day, but she was the first one I saw, and the part of me that had given up because I need glasses raised it's head, and I realized that maybe that dream of mine didn't have to stay on that shelf. When we went to Space Camp in elementery school, I was over-the-moon about the simulated microgravity missions, getting to "jump" around in the harness that mimic'd the moon's gravitational force, and being able to walk around the campus and learn about space and NASA's endevors. I have the model shuttle I must have bought - or rather, my dad bought me - sitting proudly on display on my shelf at home now.
Fittingly, the model is of the shuttle that was named Discovery that sits for me to see when I arrive home.
It turns out, I've come to know, that it's not just Earth's sky that has me enraptured. It's - well, all of them. Jupiter has lightning that I'd love to send - or at least, see the results of - a probe into to capture it's bolts of lightning, there are tornados - well, technically closer to dust devils, but when they're as strong as our tornados...- on Mars. There is so much more to see, and learn, about not just the atmospheres and dynamics of and in our solar system, but the planets beyond. When I heard the word exometeorology, everything that I'd quietly laid to rest on the shelf of "can't" sprung up anew, and clicked into place.
I've heard that it's a bit of a niche field. That's okay, I'm kind of into a lot of the niche interests, if it wasn't apparent already. And well, that does make potential job and research prospects a bit easier in some ways (and a lot harder in others, too, but that's okay too). It's probably not realistic to expect to go to space for me still, but that's okay. I'd love to, still, but I'm also really, really okay with using instrumentation and research to study atmospheres across the universe too.