Dissertation Indecision
For the past two years I have *theoretically* been working on a PhD dissertation in the realm of climate change science – namely, investigating the potential affects of anthropogenic climate change on severe thunderstorm environments. My advisers have been world-renowned scientists in either climate change or severe thunderstorm environments. The downside to all of this is that one of my advisers now lives in Australia, and the other is a scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory. Both of these scientists are incredibly busy and it makes things difficult for a graduate student needing mentorship and guidance.
All of that is background information to justify my recent decision to change my dissertation topic. I’m leaving the climate change sciences (for the time being) and coming back to my true love…severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. I don’t have a specific topic at the moment, but I do have a general area I’d like to do research – southeast US, cool-season severe weather events. To the non-meteorologists, this might seem a bit boring, but it is actually one of the more fascinating, and incredibly difficult / complex problems remaining in severe thunderstorm and tornado forecasting. A disproportionate number of tornado fatalities occur in the southeast United States, most occurring in what is typically referred to as the “cool-season” (roughly late October through March). (The 5 February 2008 Super Tuesday tornado outbreak is a perfect example of a southeast US cool-season tornado outbreak – 55 fatalities in 4 states). There is a lot of speculation as to why there is such a high number of fatalities (socio-economic reasons, nighttime tornadoes, etc), but none of this speculation helps with improving forecast skill in these areas, and almost certainly doesn’t matter to the residents affected by these events.
My current plan is to spend the next month or two identifying exactly what are some of the problems in forecasting these events, and then write a short 10-15 page summary of my findings and what I plan to do to address the scientific questions I raise. After this, I’ll present a seminar to the National Weather Center detailing my findings, and hopefully announce what I plan to specifically address for my PhD. Thus, over the next few weeks I’ll talk to my friends at the Storm Prediction Center and seek the source of some of their frustrations regarding these cool-season events, read National Weather Service Service Assessment reports on known events, and read a lot of journal articles.
I can’t wait to begin…
