Thursday, April 12, 2018

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: EGU 2018 Day 3

jules was talking in the first session this morning (paleo data assimilation) so had to rush in a bit early. She was talking about our plans for reconstructing the last deglaciation (21ka to present). It seems to have gone ok, I was sitting in on the proper data assimilation session so didn’t get to hear it 🙂 In a bizarre blast from the past, someone was talking about orthogonality of bred vectors and even mentioned that I’d done some work on that many years ago! I suppose that sort of makes up for when other people ostentatiously omit our work from their list of references despite it being one of the most obvious and seminal sources for the topic under discussion. Not that I’m bitter or anything. I expect it’s accidental some of the time.

Another free lunch thanks to an important discussion on policy matters at GMD. Not that I was part of the policy-making process, but I sneaked in along with the proper executive editors and ate all the food while they were talking 🙂 I then went for a very gentle and slow run for reasons that will be made obvious in a future blog. Well, I mean the reasons for it being gentle and slow (other than being straight after lunch). The reason for doing the run at all is just that I wanted a bit of fresh air and there was nothing compelling in the program. We’ve always found it is impossible to do 5 full days anyway at such a big conference as this, no human brain can reasonably be expected to cope with that much science. I returned for some more paleoclimate stuff including a medal lecture from yet another old white man. I especially liked the way he managed to open by telling us all about the other medal he’d just been awarded by That Other Organisation. It was a good talk though and it’s not really fair to blame recipients for the limitations of the process. His talk concerned Dansgaard-Oeschger events, the massive rapid changes in climatic conditions that happened irregularly through colder periods in Earth’s recent paleoclimatic past. It’s still unclear exactly how and why they happen.

Evening posters were (as usual) related to the daytime talks, so more data assimilation of modern and paleo flavours, which kept us busy until it was time for dinner.


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Over the years we’ve discovered some nice restaurants outside the most touristy bits which are reasonably quiet. Yesterday was the schnitzel, tonight was the turn of the Chinese. This pic is just the walk home though.


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