Today, my day at SSP started off pretty normal.
I ate cereal for breakfast, and then listened to a Python lecture about lists and images – the main highlights were arguing what [-1] index does in a list, and playing around with the delightful swingy chairs in the lecture hall.
After lunch, I had another lecture about 3D vectors and spherical trigonometry. At one point, there was an expression numbered 24 (!). Let’s just say that after that lecture, I get why spherical trigonometry is never taught in schools.
After the lecture, I worked on the newly posted Python exercises before changing for dinner.
It was only when I was walking back to my dorm after dinner to change back into more comfortable clothes that something unexpected happened. I was looking at clouds like this:
And then ten minutes later, after I had changed and was walking back to the lecture hall, this was happening:
It’s never nice to be caught in a rainstorm, especially since I had left all my stuff at the lecture hall before I went to dinner and so I didn’t have an umbrella or any sort of rain jacket. Thankfully, it wasn’t raining that hard, and I remembered an old Minutephysics video saying you should always run through rain to minimize how wet you get, so I hightailed it all the way back to the lecture hall and managed to avoid getting completely drenched.
Normally, that would be that, and I would have continued on with my day. But since I have an obsessive interest in weather, and because I don’t have much research results to report on yet since we’re still on day 4, I’ll spend the remainder of this post on weather I’ve observed so far at SSP.
The basis for most of the weather so far has been the North American monsoon, which can be briefly be summarized like this: as the heart of summer approaches, prevailing winds throughout the Southwest shift from dry, westerly air to moist, southerly air from the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of California. Once this more humid air is in place over the region, intense daytime heating and local mountain ranges push the air upwards towards higher, cooler altitudes, where it condenses forming clouds, rain, and thunderstorms.
The monsoon isn’t consistent from day to day due to varying local factors, so a day can range anywhere from completely clear to a torrential downpour (today, I ran into a sudden monsoon shower, which isn’t that uncommon). At least so far, the weather for local observations at night has looked like this:
Night of 6/25: clouded out
Night of 6/26: clouded out
Night of 6/27: ongoing, but very likely to be clouded out.
At least the next few nights look somewhat better. I’m going to observe at TMO for the first time on Saturday (technically Sunday since I have the late shift), so I hope the weather cooperates. But as someone with substantial observational astronomy experience before coming to SSP, I know that astronomers just have to take whatever they get. Our professor has assured us that we have multiple layers of backup plans, so we will get our data. I’m still looking forward to future observations. Even if it’s overcast at every one.
Andrew is a rising senior from Plano West Senior High School, Plano, Texas. He is very interested in astronomy and telescopes (an interest that developed a long time ago, not with SSP), and has spent many hours stargazing at dark sites. His other interests include geography and building computers.
