Let me try to insert the movie that i made...
i hope it works
It shows the currents (blue arrows) and the drifter path(starts with green dot then black line and ends with red dot). They are supposed to match up. You be the judge.
Good morning all,
Last week i finally got the codar data i have been working with processed and plotted. Does anyone know how to save a .M file as a .mpeg or .avi movie so i can post it. Have a script that shows all of the plots in sucession, making it look like a movie. It shows the currents and drifter together.
The next step i need to do is work on processing the same data using the script i got from scripps. Ill start that today.
Last week the office was packed to the brim. Everyone from Qualitas met together in Madrid. Everyone made presentation to show the team what they are personally working on . We had many, occasionally very long, meetings every day. Two of the meetings were with other possible investing companys. The other gropus that visited seemed pretty interested in the presentations. At the end of the first presntation, Andres asked me to ad-lib a short presentation about the glider. Little stressful. It is really hard describing the motion and behavior of the glider in spanish. I want to send a thank you to Igor for posting the videos on the web. After my feeble attempt to describe the gliders i pulled up the RUCOOL page and played the video from CNN. It def saved my behind.
Now for entertainment news:
Last week i went go-karting with everyone at the office. What a blast! Ive been on gocarts before but these ones flew. No joke the must have gone 30-40 mph at top speed. THERE werre 6 of us total and we all started at the same time, just like a race. It was great. High speed turns and a couple of good crashes. I was awarded the title of most wreckless and at the same time best racer. I never really liked watching racing but its different to be the driver. What a rush.
This weekend myself, Bruno , his girlfriend and Juan Carlos went to Torrevieja to Juan Carlos' beach house. It was very nice, but the crowds there are crazy. There is more traffic there at 3 in the morning than there is at noon. Very big night life. We just went bowling instead. I think i represented the US and its bowling prowess pretty well with a win.
This week i am going to take a trip to Valencia, in particular L'Albufera. L'Albufera is a salt water marsh where Qualitas is/has installed many doppler sensors to monitor the tidal flux of water. This marsh has 5 rivers leading to the Mediterranean. Using riversonds and other doppler sensors they monitor the status of the Marsh. this area is a large wildlife reserve. I have heard it is a very nice area, however it smells awful. Im ready for the worst. It will be interesting to see one of the setups they have, since i am so used to only seeing Codar sites.
On the Codar front, Vicente is in Barcelona for a few days working on the Masnou site. Hopefully by the end of the week everything will be finally straightened out there. It really takes a lot of effort to set up a codar site. After the initial installation there is def a long period of tweaking everything out untill it is working correclty.
Also i want to say great job to everyone working on the glider lately. I keep getting emails through rugliderops from Eric, showing crazy flight plots. Good job noticing the 360s and working with that problem.
ok ttyl---Evan
Hi everyone,
Sorry I havnt posted a blog in a while, I just got back to Qualitas today after a nice break. My girlfriend visited for a couple of days and i got a chance to explore some of Madrid. Highlights include La Reina Sophia art museum, tapas in the Latina district and a daytrip to segovia. Very fun.
Lately I have been mainly working on 2 projects. Continuing work on my codar project and also i had another meeting with Marta from Puertos del Estado concerning the freak waves. I think that i made a lot of progress at the end of last week with my codar project. I finally got a current map plotted up and it does agree with the drifter. It was rewarding to see this. I then tried to run the program in weekly intervals to deal with memory issues on the computer but it turns out a week is too much data to process. I am going to try again with shorter time periods then in the end lay out all the plots and see how i did. Here is the first plot that i made, keep in mind it is only 4 days worth of data so it is not very impressive...
I hope it looks better on your screen than it does on mine.
So i hope that soon i will have completed this with all the data soon.
Next week I will be working with Vicente on QA/QC on the galician sites.
On the freak waves side. Out of all the records I have looked at, there is an overwhelming majority of freak waves that fit in to one category...
I wrote a 'report' on what i did with the freak wave data for puertos yesterday and today including this fancy graphic and others. Marta said she will read it over the weekend then send me back info on how i should edit it. Now it is 10 pages in english. Im not looking forward to rewriting it in spanish. I think i will be good friends with the dictionary when i have to start translating.
Right now i am reading an article by Dysthe, Krogstad and Muller titled 'oceanic rogue waves'. It is pretty interesting, however it makes many references to "second order random wave theroy". If anyone can sum this up, or first order for that matter, I would really appreciate it. I have looked online and all i can find is other articles that include more greek letters than i know. Either way it is a very good article that includes many extreme examples of freak waves. If you are interested look up the Agulhas current off Africa, it seems like it is a hot spot.
Bye guys, and here is a shot of all of us from this weekend...
PS i got a haircut
Later guys!---Evan
Good Morning loyal readers,
Yesterday i was very pleased to finally wrinkle out all of the kinks in the script i wrote to process the freak wave data. I found out out some very interesting things about them. They are exactly that: Freaks. I am working with 4 different sites and have about 4 years worth of data. I wanted to see if any particlular time of year has more freak waves than another. My initial hypothesis was that the most incidences would occur during transition months. This is when the majority of the strongest storms pass through and might effect the quantity of freak waves. I really cant say if this is true because i dont have much data and they seem to be relatively evenly spread throughout the year. Also i dont know if they are even associated with storms. I did however find a couple examples that i want to investigate further. The first example includes 3 instances of freak waves within a 24 hour period. They all occurred off the coast of galicia during November 11, 2003. I am going to look online to see if i can find a site that has weather records to see if there was a big storm. The time of year is right and the 24 hour window of time makes it seem like a passing event.
The next event is a freak wave that satisfies both the wave height and crest height criteria. This one i think is a very good example of a freak wave...
i dont understand why these graphs always come out so poorly. I even changed the resolution i printed it at. In this case the significant wave height is 3.71 m. Remember that the significant wave height is the average of the heightest 1/3 of all of the waves. Right before the freak wave comes it looks like there are 3 little waves that are about 2m. Then the big one comes rolling past at a whopping 8.5m. That is a huge difference.
Here is another cool example. This one isnt quite as textbook but it makes up for that in sheer size. ...
This was a big day to begin with. The significant wave height was 8.5 meters. Then the freak wave comes by at about 18m. Gigantic.
I am tentatively planning to meet with Marta at Puertos on the 23,24th of july. I am going to show her these figures and ask for some more data. Now that i have a program to print all of these graphs, it is very easy to run more through it. In particular i am going to ask for data from november 2002. If you remember the Prestige oil spill occurred during a storm during that month. I want to look to see if there were any freak waves recorded during the same time. I think it would be interesting to see if that did have anything to do with that ship's demise.
This weekend I am going with my room mate Juan Carlos to his family's beach house. It is on the Med about 4 hours away from madrid. It should be a good time. Ill have to post some pics of the trip.
Here is a pic of our return trip from the SCUBA course. Everyone here loves this pic. Hopefully you will too...
This is Fernando. Check out his eyes. Sleeping with them open. Haha. He imeditatly woke up after this pic and proceeded to call us all cabrones.
Bye everyone and have a great weekend---Evan
Hi all,
I am finally back in Madrid. Although traveling was amazing, i have to say i was very tired. Constantly moving around really burns you out. I know, I have it sooooooooooo rough.
This past weekend I hung out with Javi at Montserrat. Javi has got it all. He has 2 dogs, a sweet house, a pool, a garden, awesome patio, incredible view overlooking Montserrat, and a world class climbing destination in his back yard. I had such a good time. We went climbing 3 times. Friday evening we went bouldering in the forest, then saturday and sunday we went sport climbing in Montserrat. The rock there is strange, it is a conglomerate. It is kind of like cement with tons of fist sized rocks stuck in it. Very technical and demanding on your fingers. I completed my hardest onsight lead there 5.10c, then got whooped on everything else. After not climbing for a month, it really hurts to start again. I was and still am sore. Javi is by far the best climber i have been with. He put up a 5.12b like it was nothing. He has pushed the limits of 8a+ 5.14ish. These numbers may mean nothing to you, but pros are climbing in the 5.14 range. He is something else. Thanks for a great weekend of climbing and hospitality!
I now have to adjust to normalcy again in Madrid. I am still working with the codar data. Today i made an instruction manual for installing connectors on the end of the cables. I cant attach it, file is too big. I guess you will miss out.
I GOT MY NEW COMPUTER TODAY! Josh, Courtney and everyone back at IMCS breath easy.
Ill post again tomorrow with some more montserrat pics, but here is a tasty morsel that you might be interested in...
grilled calamari, pretty tasty. Buen Provecho--Evan
Thats right! Spain won the EuroCup. I however was stuck in the car when the game happened. We left our scuba course later than expected and we had to listen to the game on the radio. When 3 announcers are screaming at the same time it is hard to make out what is happening. I asked Juan Carlos to say bueno when it was good and malo when it was bad. That was the game for me.
The scuba course was pretty amazing. The first day was a morning session in the pool learning the basics then an afternoon session in the Mediterranian. It really wasnt that great. Really murky water and not much to see. The next day it was compeletly different. We suited up early in the morning and went out before the wind picked up. WOW. The water was perfectly clear with schools of fish and rock reef everywhere. We stayed down for about 45 mins. It was really nice. I am glad i got my scuba certification out of the way. I had fun, but i dont think i will go out of my way to go scuba diving again. If the opportunity presents itself, sure ill go. I enjoyed the experience but i think i like breathing non bottled air more.
For the past 3 days I have been in barcelona. This has been my travel plans for the past 2 weeks...
I have been all over the place!
I can tell you, I am totally wiped out right now. Since Monday we (myself, angel and Neus) have pulled 8am-9pm days. Serious lifting of heavy things. We set up 2 high resolution codar sites in the ports of Masnou and Barcelona. Both locations are very unique and unlike anything i have dealt with so far. In the port of Masnou, we were very limited to the location where we could put the antenna. We had to mount it on top of a street light. It was ridiculous, but in the end it looked pretty good...
There it is, rising high above the tropical jungle. What an epic battle it was to put that up. When a 10 lb box is at the end of a 12 footish pole, holy cow, does it require a lot of strength to hoist. After much trial and error( key word error), we finally got the antenna up.
In the port of barcelona, we were welcomed by the soothing sounds of cement trucks barreling by. Yes, we were so kindly given a location to set up a Codar site in a cement factory. The dust is incredible. Absolutely horrible. This is what we were dealing with...
This pic was at the end of the day, but there is normally a line of cement trucks filling up and passing by.
These past 3 days have been so satisfying. When we arrived, there was nothing and now there are 2 operating stations. The labor was very intense. Long days and very sore muscles. The most time consuming part was running the wires. In port barcelona (above pic) we needed to run the wires under ground from the brick building to the cement wall. That is 30 meters (+/- 100 feet) . That is a long way. We bought a plastic guide to feed the wires through the plastic tubing under ground and found out that all of the cement dust falls into the tubes. Then when it rains, bingo! you get cement filled tubes. We had to get specialists to come with high pressure water hoses and blast out all of the debris from the tubes. Then we went to a Mega-Home Depot (La Plataforma, a construction store only for businesses) and bought a 4mm steel wire to feed the wires through. When we finally got the wires done, there was a sense of total joy.
Here i am with my favorite toy of the trip...
Now that is power! (insert laugh of Tim 'the tool man' Taylor)
Now that the sites are set up we need to look at the data. We will be doing this on Monday when Vicente and Javi arrive. Then we all will look at the radials and see whats up.
Although both of the sites are physically in place, they are not in ideal locations. Both locations constantly have large vehicles constantly moving. Both sites have giant retaining walls filled with metal. The Barcelona site has a giant metal building very close by. There are a lot of unknowns to contend with, but i hope it works well.
I just heard that the Finesterre site that we fixed last week is still working. Im glad to know that all our work paid off.
Tomorrow I am going to Montserrat to climb with Javi and I will be leaving Monday evening to return back to Madrid. It has been a good time.
I have no idea what my internet situation will be like the next few days (surprise surprise) so ill write when i get a chance. Hold down the fort everyone and have a great independence day!----Evan
Here is a quick look at what i have been working on regarding the Codar data in Jersey...
What a dissapionting image... I guess i really havnt gotten the hang of blogging.
Attention: If anyone who reads this realizes that i am stating info incorrectly, Please write a reply post indicating my errors.
If you use a magnifying glass you will be able to see a bunch of things. The area within the red line represents the 'mask' area. This is an area that if any radials (data) land in, it is considered bad and not used. The pink dots represnt 'grid' points. They will be necessary for the interpolation of the data. The blue line represents a drifter that will be used to help verify the data. The drifter started at the green dot and ended at the red dot. The other dots as shown in the upper left corner represent the 6 codar stations that will be used for this project. And finally the black line is land, Duh!
Here is the demo i am basing all of my work off of. Keep in mind it is an image of the Monterrey area in California so it looks (is) backwards. haha
This is a bare bones representation of what they have. The light blue square represents the grid they are using. The Pink line represents the Mask area. The 3 other areas i think are codar coverage for each site? But mine is pretty similar in general.
My next step will be downloading a the full timeseries of data and then running it through a program i have been working on. Before i did it without a mask, and some problems occured. Hopefully it will go smoothly this time.
later guys---Evan
Another day, another victory! Spain beat (destroyed) Russia yesterday 3-0. The first half was a pretty evenly match but in the second Spain played near perfectly. They couldn't do anything wrong. Russia on the other hand could not catch a break at all. What a game. Spain is now in the finals against Germany this sunday. Everyone is very nervous because Germany is the Yankees of Europe. The question is: Can Paella find one more win over the Brats?
Enough soccer news. I feel like it has been forever since i last wrote a post. I was in Finesterre (Fisterra if you are a Gallego) for the previous 3 days. Finesterre is located in the NW corner of Spain, about 7-8 hours away from Madrid. Finesterre comes from the words fin de la tierra, "End of the world". For the Europeans in century's past, it was in fact the end of the world. Today, Finesterre is no more than a fishing village and a tourist attraction. However, due to weather that would make Seattle seem sunny, it does not attract vacationers. The main visitors are people who have partaken in a pilgrimage. There is a very common route that begins in France and ends in Finesterre. Once the pilgrims arrive they burn all of their clothes and shoes, to signify a new beginning.
My pilgrimage from Madrid to Finesterre with Angel and Vicente was equally enlightening. We set out with a single mission. We have 3 days to fix a Codar station, or else! When we arrived we checked out its vitals. Here is are some images of their setup...
Anyway, thanks to the many trips i took to Sandy Hook, Tuckerton, and Moriches with Bob, i was not a complete waste of space. I helped Angel with the manual work on the system, while Vicente monitored it's status. After what seemed like a million tests, we narrowed the problem down to a single wire. The rack with all of the computer equipment is located inside the lighthouse on the second floor. Obviously the antennas are outside.
We needed to get a new cable from upstairs to outside and not break anything. The old setup at Finesterre had a cable running from the receive antenna into the building through pipes under the concrete patio. From there it ran inside under the floor to a lightning protector. From there it ran up the wall across the ceiling up another wall then into the rack. We replaced all the afore mentioned. As long as i am thanking people for their help, I would like to thank my Pop for teaching me how to fish cable through walls, as it came in very handy. When it was all said and done we replaced the 2 old wires and connections with a spanking new cable and installed a brand new lightning protector in the rack itself. Now everything is in one place and we don't have to look in a bunch of places to find a problem. Now if something does go wrong, it will be very easy to find it. Probably the highlight of this whole experience was when Angel taught me how to splice cables and re attach the connectors. He is very skilled at running and preparing cables of every type. From stripping the wire, to crimping the hardware, to soldering a connection, he showed me how to do it all. I can say that the whole experience was very satisfying. We also installed an new GPS setup on the roof of the lighthouse. Nothing like using a giant 2 handed impact drill, using masonry bits, to install a GPS on the chimney of a building. I like working with my hands, and at the end of the trip we had a finished working product. Books can only teach you so much, you need to get your hands dirty every once and while.
Another cool thing that we did was do a pattern run. While Angel and Vicente stayed on land i went out into the water with Moncho, our local boat captain. Our goal in the boat was to run a relatively even 1.5 km radius around the Codar antenna. We needed to do this to help calibrate the system. Here is Moncho...
His brand: Chesterfields. Moncho is a local in Fisterra. He speaks mainly Gallego, some Castillian (standard) Spanish. He is a salty dog. Talk about a rough, seafaring, chain smoking, knife weilding, bilge pump operating, anti-GPS, old school captain. Many times he looked at the GPS unit i brought along and with a look of disgust, put it straight back on to the deck. If anyone knows the waters of Finesterre, its Moncho! At one point i asked how deep the water was, and he responded with in 3 meters of the actual measured depth. Oh yeah the water is 95 meters deep at only 1km away from the lighthouse. When we got out of the bay, the ocean was not calm. With seas at about 2 meters, the ride was a bit wet. However, Moncho assured me that this was nothing. He goes out fishing as long as the waves are less than 8 meters. I think he is a little loco.
Here was the hard part about the boat ride. We communicated via walkie talkie to Angel and Vicente on the boat. Now, let me tell you, my Spanish is not what you would call perfect. In fact even in ideal conditions i am only catching about 75-80% of the conversation. Over the walky talky, with an engine roaring, on the sea, trying to relay a message to a guy who speaks mainly Gallego: IMPOSSIBLE! I might as well have been in China. Walkie-talkies are terrible. Everything sounds gargled and distorted. Every time we needed to communicate we had to stop the boat an i passed the walkies to Moncho. This is by no means ideal conditions to do a pattern run. In the end we got the info we needed and it turned out not to be so bad. What an experience.
Everything about the installation and boat portion of the trip did go very well. The food was even better. In Galicia, they like their food. HUGE portions. My style. I ate enough seafood to last me at least till lunch time. I think i could always go for more seafood though. Everything is very fresh, and clean.
Here we all are, myself, Vicente and Angel. Finesterre is a beautiful place when the weather is nice. However it usually is extremely windy and rainy. We got luck for the few days we were there and got some nice weather.
This weekend i am taking a SCUBA course in the very south of Spain. Should be fun
Next week, starting Monday at 730 am, i am leaving for Barcleona to set up a Codar station from scratch. Now there is nothing, Next Friday they will have a working Codar site. I am looking forward to it. I will also be spending the weekend with Javi, climbing at Mont Serrat. Equally exciting. who am I kidding, more exciting.
Thats about it. Same as last week, i don't know what my internet situation will be like for the next little bit. Hopefully i can unwind each day and write a little post, or else ill have to wait until i get back and write another mega-rant like this one. Thanks for reading and if you are interested i have my entire foto album at this link....There are a few more pics of Moncho. haha
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rutgers_cool/sets/72157605561030779/
TTYL everyone and have a great weekend! ---- Evan
Spain beat Italy last night in penalty kicks. What an exciting game! It is the first time in 24 years that Spain has advanced to the semi finals of the Euro Cup. I must be good luck! The entire nation of spain, apart from the basque country, is completely thrilled. Especially here in Madrid. In the plaza de colon they set up a huge viewing screen so everyone can watch the games together. The footage of that plaza after the game was incredible. Thousands of people celebrating into the night.
Surprisingly, everyone i talked to expected Spain to loose. They kept saying that Spain cant make it past the quarter finals. Those of little faith! I maintained a firm belief that Spain would win the whole game. It was obvious from the get go that spain was dominating the match. They just couldn't put the game away. So into penalty kicks they went. According to the announcers, the two best goalies in the world, Casillas (Spain) and Bufon (Italy) were going head to head. Casillas saved 2 of 4 shots and then Spain iced the game sending the country into bedlam. Spain's "theme song" for this Euro Cup has been a 3 note gem with a whopping 4 words. "Podemos, Podemos, Podemos si!".
Earlier this weekend, Bruno (one of my house mates) had a capoeira exhibition. It is kind of like slow motion kung -fu mixed with break dancing. It was pretty cool. Capoeira originated in Brazil. It includes many aspects of the slave culture that existed in the past. The instruments they play include , a drum and a strange gourd wire combo. They accompany this rhythmic beat with both clapping and chanting. The chanting is a mix of Brazilian Portuguese and the original slave language.
Yesterday was a pretty special day for another reason. here is why
Just try that today. I bet you cant.
Tomorrow I go to Galicia to work on a codar station in Finesterre. It should be fun. I will be traveling a lot in the next 2 weeks. Hopefully i will be able to get internet otherwise ill have to pull a Scott and find a McDonalds with wifi. Haha. After Galicia I will be going to Granada (southern coast of Spain) to take a SCUBA course (this weekend), then next week I am going to Barcelona to work on another Codar station. After we finish up in Barcelona I will stay for a long weekend and meet up with Javi. Javi also works for Qualitas but lives near Barcelona because it is close to very good climbing areas. We are going to go to Mont Serrat. I have hear that he can lead 8+, which is about 5.13-5.14 in the american grading scale. Either way it is hard. I am looking forward to it very much.
OK, ill try to write again tomorrow, but i dont know what the internet situation is like. Bye--Evan
Buenos Dias! I am back at Qualitas after working 2 days at Puertos del Estado. I enjoyed my time working with Marta on the freak wave data. I wrote a script that should (key word: should!) be able to print out a graphic of each freak wave, and a zoomed in version of the same graph, so i can look them all over and try to classify each wave. I was assigned 4 locations to look at. Here they are...
I think i am finally getting a little better grasp on using this blog page. At least this map looks readable.
As it is easy to see each site is in a rather unique location. Each site receives swell/wave action from a different direction. Here are some facts i find interesting when looking at these sites. Villano-Sisargas receives swell from the North West. This area gets crushed by the constant storms that are coming across the Atlantic. At this buoy site the water depth is 386 m. Pretty deep. So the waves are not going to be affected by the bottom contours very much (compared to water depth at maybe 10-20 m). Off our coast, the waters are very shallow. I know from experience that going out about 10-20 miles off our shore the water is no deeper than about 60 feet. Using the ever so convenient google earth ruler tool, i measured that this buoy is about 18.5 miles from the coast. What a sharp drop off! It is totally different than what we have. For this reason it is very easy for the Spaniards to drop off buoys, relatively close to shore and be situated in very deep waters. The depths of the the sites Tarragona, Cadiz and Gran Canaria are respectively, 688m, 450m and 780m. And they receive swell from respectively the East/South-East, South-West, North. From here i will attempt to draw some conclusions on what season, if any, are freak waves most common, if they occur most often from a certain direction swell, if they occur most often when there are strong currents nearby, etc.
Here is an example of a particularly interesting graph i made....
I guess it is hard to read, i don't know why... but if you can kind of make out the large blue peak that occurs near 40 seconds, there is a freak wave. In this case the HS (significant wave height) is 4.92m. the HZ (Freak wave height) is 10.2 m. That is a pretty large wave. And it pretty much jumps out of nowhere. This graph shows that this was just 1 wave (compared to other styles of freak waves: Tres Hermanas, etc). So far this is the largest one i have found. But any size freak wave can be dangerous. Since they are about double the significant wave height, it could easily catch any boat off guard and really cause some problems. Think about if you are in a relatively small fishing boat, about 40-50 feet long and the seas are about 6 feet. First of all it wouldn't be that comfortable and i would rather be on land. But then imagine some random wave comes along at a whopping 12 feet and smacks you around. It could be pretty bad situation. Like i said, i would rather be on land in those conditions.
Pretty cool, huh? I think i am going to meet with Marta every other week or so so we can continue to go over the data, share results, and maybe work on some statistics (yikes).
Portugal lost last night to Germany. It was a pretty entertaining game. Bruno, my Portuguese house mate, was noticeably upset. Spain however has won 3 in a row and now is in the second round. Everyone here says that Spain always chokes in the second round. Well see. They play Italy on Sunday. Big game. Hopefully they go far. I want to see this place go crazy.
Back to the glider for a second. GREAT JOB everyone. 2000km is a long way. It must be very hard not having good satellite imagery. I am very impressed with the ingenuity in steering the glider. I talked with josh yesterday about it for a few minutes. He said you were looking at the sbd temperature data and trying to find non stratified warm water. Very smart. Stay in the red guys!
I'm about done here. Have a good weekend and root for Spain to win on Sunday. Dont worry, if you miss the game ill fill you in on monday. Later!--Evan