reflections on october 2022
Monday, October 31st, 2022 (Reformation day)
Life
October was surprisingly mild and sunny. Friends from Berlin visited and we took walks in the park. We went to Riddagshausen and saw the artificial lakes of the Cistercian monastery. We also tried fiets kaffee.bar near our home. It's great.
Anna and I were walking in Prinz-Albrecht Park. It was a dry autumn evening. The sun was shining through the canopies of the tall trees that were all yellow and red. Leaves were slowly falling to the ground. How can you not become spiritual in such a moment?
Publish or perish
Utkarsh Mital has published his paper on downscaling snowdepth data using a machine learning approach. The paper is published in Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems: 10.1175/AIES-D-22-0010.1
Our paper on surface-subsurface interactions in the Lower Triangle, East River Watershed, Colorado, USA, is under review at Scientific Reports.
No other papers in the pipeline and the semester starts soon. I hope we can make some progress on Rachel's paper on hillslope hydrology. Other than that, Mikael has some ideas but he is also occupied with teaching.
Team building
Dharini started as a graduate research assistant in our group. She will work on implementing ecohydrological processes in SERGHEI.
Talking is silver
I talked about modelling the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum at the Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain. The talk was for a group focusing on wildfire modelling. I talked about how soil-plant-atmosphere models can be used to generate initial conditions for wildfire modelling.
Mikael and I gave a short lecture on Urban Ecohydrology with the title Wasser, Pflanzen und Beton (i.e., Water, Plants, and Concrete) in TU Braunschweig's Studium Generale 2022. It was a lot of fun.
Reading for pleasure
Field Notes on Science and Nature
I've read Field Notes on Science and Nature by M. Canfield (ed). It's a compilation of essays by field scientists that describe how they organise and use their notes. It's accompanied with scans of the real notebooks. This was an inspiring read.
The essay by R. Kitching is very good. He talks about a three-layered approach: (1) the field notebook, (2) the journal, and (3) the publications. The field notebook contains the data, the journal a narrative recollection of the field campaign. Finally, the publication is a polished subset of the synthesis of (1) and (2). From page 74, on the value of paper-based notebooks:
Even with the rise of laptop-based spreadsheets, I still try to ensure that all data collected in the field make their appearance in a notebook as well as on that spreadsheet. Paper is still proving more durable than electronic data and ink more permanent than the simple polarization of electrons. For a start, ink does not readily change its state in the presence of a magnetic field, and the human optical recognition system (that is to say, reading) doesn't change in basic design every few years. Accordingly, the notebook remains an essential backup tool. It also works in all climates, without a source of electricity. — Roger Kitching, A reflection of the truth
M.R. Canfield (ed), Field Notes on Science and Nature. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 2011.
Kodoku No Gourmet
I've read Kodoku No Gourmet (The Gourmet) by M. Kusumi and J. Tanguchi. It's a manga that follows its protagonist—an independent salesman—on his journeys to various restaurants, cafes, and bakeries in Japan. Most locations are in Tokyo, but there is one chapter that takes place in Osaka. It was OK, I enjoyed reading it.
M. Kusumi, J. Tanguchi, Kodoku No Gourmet. Fusosha Publishing Inc., Tokyo, Japan, 1997.