GATEway to a Career in Observational Meteorology

In this presentation I will give a brief summary of my participation in GATE as an operator of the MIT C-band radar aboard the R. V. Gilliss, when I was a graduate student. This presentation will be based on memory, a diary I kept, and photographs. During this wonderful experience at sea, I got to observe tropical oceanic convection on the radar, while running outside to see what it actually looked like. This foreshadowed similar experiences later on in my career when I got to observe (and am still getting to observe) severe convective storms and tornadoes on ground-based, mobile Doppler radars, while looking outside to see what they actually look like. I’ll show some photographs of tropical cloud lines, cumulonimbus clouds, a waterspout, flying fish, and colleagues and friends. I make the case that one cannot overemphasize the importance of having graduate students participate in major field programs, as they learn how to make observations of weather phenomena, collect data, collaborate with others while collecting the data, think critically about the quality of the data and correct for errors, analyze the data, think critically about what the data mean, and finally obtain significant scientific findings and present them to the community at conferences and in publications, for discussion: In other words, experiencing the entire field-program process from, as it is now said, “end to “end.”