Corwin Wright

NASA Selects Two Earth System Explorers Missions - NASA These two missions were selected for continued development as part of NASA’s Earth System Explorers Program, which conducts principal investigator-led Earth

Significant news out of NASA earth science: They've finally selected two new missions for its explorers competed line, cost capped at $335M: EDGE, a next-gen lidar and successor to Icesat-2/GEDI, and STRIVE, a limb sounder for pollution and more and much-needed successor to Aura.

NASA Selects Two Earth System Explorers Missions - NASA These two missions were selected for continued development as part of NASA’s Earth System Explorers Program, which conducts principal investigator-led Earth

STRIVE selected :-) Looking forward to continuing working with the rest of the mission science team and hopefully getting some really useful data! www.nasa.gov/news-release...

Mechanisms Linking Stratospheric Gravity Wave Activity to Hurricane Intensification: Insights From Model Simulation of Hurricane Joaquin This study provides further evidence for using stratospheric gravity wave (GW) activity as a proxy for hurricane intensification GWs excited during hurricane intensification display higher freque...

This specific image is from agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/... and I think the lead author Xue made it, but we make images like this fairly routinely for our work - it's very helpful to help visualise the spatial structure of the wave field mentally.

Yes! It's done in Matlab and actually fairly easy - it's just a set of isosurfaces of constant vertical velocity (w'), combined with a surface image from Natural Earth. Maybe 20-30 lines of code? The hard part is asking a modeller nicely to make the data for you to plot ;-)

Deadline is 22nd of Feb, and all apps received by then will be fairly considered (right now it says apps will close when we have a candidate - this is an admin error and I have asked for it to be removed). Funding is specifically for *this project* rather than as a competition with other projects.

We are currently advertising a four-year fully-funded* PhD project on if we can use stratospheric waves to predict hurricanes and typhoons earlier. If you or someone you know would be interested in this, please get in touch!

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

* for UK students only, unfortunately

London. (Durham's is about a year older than London's)

It's usually much easier to handwrite mathematically-based subject exams - entering equations is extremely tedious on a computer even with Latex, which many students won't know, and an exam Q would usually need at least a dozen rearrangement steps. This would describe almost all exams in our dept.

Having given my AGU talk on Hunga-induced atmospheric perturbations, I'm now off to the food court to address my own hunger perturbation.

Texte: le calendrier de l’avent interdit Image 1: un pied de biche Image 2: un ensemble de casiers automatiques type « Amazon » situé en extérieur

Got a new grant just in time to not lose my two fantastic postdocs :-) Will also be recruiting for a new PhD student to study whether atmospheric gravity waves can be used to help predict hurricanes - an ad will be coming out probably early next year once the paperwork has worked through the system.

Must be a black hole nearby ;-)

Giving an undergraduate lecture on the outer planets, and it feels weird to introduce Uranus as "discovered near the big Sainsburys'". However, since it was discovered in Bath, they all live here but won't know the street name, and that's the nearest major landmark...

I am currently writing a set of *three* lectures in which I describe the whole atmosphere from surface to geocorona for an audience of electrical engineers. It is ... compressed. After this I get another set of three lectures to cover all solar and space physics, then one lecture for the planets.

Just to contradict the tube strike horror stories, this is my trip from King's Cross to Paddington (Thameslink then Elizabeth Line) at 4.45pm during today's strike. Not quite sure where all the people are - maybe scared off by the crowds earlier in the week?

Quantifying Predictability of the Middle Atmosphere - Eos A new high-resolution global model is used to study predictability of atmospheric circulation from the surface to 120 kilometers.

✨Editor's Pick✨

In JGR: Atmospheres, a new high-resolution global model is used to study predictability of atmospheric circulation from the Earth's surface up to 120 kilometers.

🔗 Learn more in @eos.org: buff.ly/Hbe4kx4

#AGUPubs #Atmosphere

The first time I did fluid dynamics was in my PhD in atmospheric physics...

Google's Gemini AI tells a Redditor it's 'cautiously optimistic' about fixing a coding bug, fails repeatedly, calls itself an embarrassment to 'all possible and impossible universes' before repeating 'I am a disgrace' 86 times in succession

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

It turns out that satellites behave rather oddly when the Earth is 1000x less heavy than it should be. That was a delightfully challenging typo to find in the several hundred lines of orbit scanning code I'd written.

Exciting! Might be worth a chat about this at some point? I think you discussed it being potentially useful for wave stuff with Phoebe when you were both in Boulder a few weeks ago.

As a result of basically constant work travel for the last few months, I have upgraded the essentially-standard description of my inbox when I beg for forgiveness for delayed replies from "a bit of a bin fire" to "radioactive".

Job alert: we are looking for a postdoc to join the Atmospheric Dynamics group in Oxford to study Arctic atmospheric dynamics. The focus is on energy transfers between scales and implications for predictability. More details here: tinyurl.com/yc6h4b35

FAAM science flight (@ncas-uk.bsky.social) currently up over the Alps with all three mission scientists aboard from
@uniofbath.bsky.social @caer-bath.bsky.social - hopefully Neil Hindley, Phoebe Noble and Tim Banyard will get some good data to help make the @metoffice.gov.uk model better :-)

Is this a better or worse name than my old one?

I nearly went for "Isles Anglo-Normand" after a minute or two of searching as it was a form to enter my phone number and at least they have the same phone prefix as the UK...

The most irritating one today was "Royaume Uni" near the bottom next to "Etats-Unis", clearly because someone set it to use English word order but with the French names displayed ... on the same page as another menu where it was "Grande Bretagne", in the right alphabetical place for French.

Changed my phone's OS language to be in French a few days ago as I really need the practice - my vocab is slipping badly. The worst bit? FINDING MY HOME COUNTRY'S NAME IN INTERNET DROPDOWN FORMS.

Extremely important this post by @edhawkins.org.
We are about to lose our main data source for the middle and upper atmosphere, TIMED/SABER. We are in extreme need for monitoring of the higher part the atmosphere.
Our @issibern.ch Team pointed it out a couple of months ago:
doi.org/10.1029/2024...

On 9th July, @esa.int are choosing their next Earth Explorer mission. One of the proposals (CAIRT) would provide the capability to measure the upper atmosphere but not launched for several years.

There are no easy choices, but we could lose our ability to monitor this region for an extended period.

It is now possible that the NASA satellites that monitor changes in the stratosphere and mesosphere will be phased out from October, depending on budget discussions.

If TIMED & Aura do get shut down then this would abruptly end climate monitoring of these altitudes.

arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...