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Courtesy of Ellen Jones
Todd Jones
I first became interested in studying science and math in about the 8th grade when I discovered my love for reading maps (specifically weather maps) and graphs and plots. Plus, I grew up in Northeast Ohio where there is a much-revered television weather man who happened to have gone to the same school system that I was in. So that influence was strong.
I am a MS student at Colorado State University where I am studying a cloud-resolving model. "What does that mean?", you might ask. Well, when computer models of the atmosphere that cover the whole planet are used, we have to leave out information about things like how rain forms, what happens to turbulent winds, and anything else that happens over short distances so that the computer can finish its simulation in a reasonable amount of time. Other models that only cover small areas of the world can include more information about that small-scale stuff. So I use these "cloud-scale" models, pick out some of those details, and find a way to tell the "global-scale" models about what they are missing in a "quick" way, that is, without making them do lots and lots of extra calculations that would take up too much time. It is important to know about these "small-scale" motions in the atmosphere because of the "Butterfly Effect." That's the idea that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Africa might eventually cause a hurricane to form over the Atlantic. So we would like to know about this. Sometimes, the atmosphere sometimes does things that we can't predict. So I try to find out how important these effects are when I use the "cloud-scale" models, again, so that we can tell the "global-scale" models about them in a simple way. This will make weather predictions better and better so that we will be able to "believe the weather man" a little bit more than we can right now.
I find my work rewarding in that somewhere down the line, I know that it is going to help someone in some way.
Outside of work, I love to go hiking and camping and backpacking. I also like to rollerblade and go for bike rides, and I really like to watch movies. Hopefully, I will still have time for that next year; my wife and I are expecting a baby in October 2008 and we are in the process of buying a house right now, too! We're very excited.
