It’s the first Friday of September, but the dates have become more-or-less irrelevant over the past two weeks. We began the second-half of the cruise today and I think we are all still excited to be here in the Arctic despite that feeling like “summer” again now that we’ve left the sea-ice. I have also been able to sleep well for the past few nights without the ice scraping against the side of the ship. The sound is truly unique and I laid in bed for several sleepless nights, searching for familiar sounds to which it compares. I decided that it combines the roar of a subway train passing 10 feet away with the slow-motion crunching of an industrial metal compactor (like a junkyard “car crusher”). It seems so quiet now that I actually miss the sound a little!
Despite the title of this entry, I’m a mathematician by training and have only recently begun to work in science. I only say this out of respect for my fellow students and colleagues who have always been scientists first and have an understanding of science far beyond mine. I have always been interested in science and how nature works, particularly the oceans, but chose a different path for studying the natural world. If you, the reader, have been following the blog, you’ve probably noticed that there is a lot happening on the ship. The expedition’s scientists are collecting data from every source imaginable, from clouds and sea-ice to chemical concentrations more than a mile below the ocean surface. Meanwhile, other scientists as well as the NABOS Summer School students fervently run computer simulations of real-world systems in computer models. These two aspects of science — modeling and observation — are tied together by my discipline: data assimilation. It involves a lot of complicated math designed to adjust the computer models to more accurately reflect the data collected from the real world. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to present an overview of the basic techniques and ideas of data assimilation to my fellow students, reciprocating the education they have given me in the past few weeks on a variety of topics like atmospheric dynamics, climatology, and movement of individual water masses.
– j. Stroh
