Tanja: You would be working within the "Terrestrial Impacts of Solar Output" section of hao. We are a fairly small group within hao, about 6-8 core people, plus several visitors and students working on various projects. Roble has been the principal author of the TGCM models over the past 25 years or so. I have provided technical support during the past 12 years including post-processing, visualization, comparison w/ observed data and emperical models, providing results to the upper atmosphere scientific community. At least part of your responsibilities would be to assist with the post-processing, source code maintenance, new and continuing development of diagnostic code in support of the models. Most of these codes are written in fortran (including f90), so your experience w/ that language will be useful. Don't worry about not knowing IDL or the Cray environment, you can learn much of that on the job. > * I understand that you have an experience in working with summer > undergraduate visitors. I would like to know more about the way the work > on the project is organized and your past experiences; are there seminars > or group meetings held that I could attend, what would your expectations > and my particular tasks be, is there a cooperative atmosphere at the > HAO... Summer student have worked w/ our group at least half of the past 12 years. I think overall they have had a good learning experience, and we have certainly benefitted from their work. Our summer student last year was from England (Oxford I think). He wrote a code to assist in comparisons of TIME-GCM results w/ emperical models such as MSIS, HWM, and IRI. One project you could work on might be to make satellite (UARS) data comparisons w/ tgcm simulations. We also work w/ ground based radar data (Arecibo, Millstone, etc.). Last year's summer student mentioned above is Nathan Gillett -- feel free to contact him at gillett@teaching.physics.ox.ac.uk. Hao has weekly colloquium seminars which you could certainly attend, but these are on a wide variety of topics within hao presented by hao scientists and/or visitors. Also, maybe towards the end of the summer, students may make more informal presentations of the work they have been doing. Roble and I would be your daily contacts, especially myself in terms of designing code, using the available machines, etc. You would probably see Ray less on a daily basis, but he is *very* approachable, and very appreciative of the work done by students. Basically, Ray would be your scientific contact, and I would be your technical/software contact. > * When could I determine the date of my arrival to HAO? Ask Cindy Worster about this (cmw@ucar.edu). > * I have heard of IDL but as it has a very specific application, there is > not a possibility of finding a manual in Croatia. Would that present a > problem? > * There are also not any CRAY machines in Croatia - I do not have an > experience of working on one. No, don't worry. IDL is a high level language good for imaging, graphics and visualization. You can learn what you need to on the job. For practical purposes, the Cray OS can be treated like unix, w/ f90 compilers. You can easily learn the details of submitting jobs, etc., and I can help you w/ that. > * Would there be some official weekly or bi-weekly reports that I would > have to give on my progress and to whom? No, certainly not official. Basically, you would be working w/ me and Ray and a couple of other people on a daily informal basis. With the possible exception of a talk at the end of the summer, as I mentioned above. > * Could you provide me with some references in which I could find out more > about TIME-GCM (I read the WWW site but would like to do some further > reading and get a more detailed knowledge on the processes, phenomena and > problems encountered in the development of the model.)? Roble has several hundred publications of the years. I will try to send you some specific references. I should have a bibliography on the web site, but havent managed it yet. If you are interested, you could work on improving our web site this summer. I hope you can make it. If you like the mountains, hiking, biking, etc., you would enjoy living in Boulder for the summer. --Ben ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Ben Foster High Altitude Observatory (HAO) foster@ncar.ucar.edu phone: 303-497-1595 fax: 303-497-1589 Nat. Center for Atmos. Res. P.O. Box 3000 Boulder CO 80307 USA -----------------------------------------------------------------------