Time Management

Hi there,

So this working three days a week, Honours project, blog and trying to spend at least a few minutes a day with my family is proving to be a bit of a challenge. This is of course why my updates are not terribly frequent.

In a feeble attempt to keep my blog up to date, here is a brief update on what I have been up to and what I have learned:

- After speaking with Tom (my supervisor) about my research objective, he brought me back down to earth from my lofty aspirations of solving all the wind industry's problems in a single 16,000 word document. Seems that I have over estimated what I may be able to achieve in the 39 weeks until my thesis is due.

- There are a number of different models which can be used for wind farm power forecasting but no gold standard solution. What is available tends to be either very crude or very intensive and expensive

- Running climate modelling software on supercomputers takes a lot of time and effort to design a model and run it.

With this in mind, I am either going to run some models using a more simple climate model than I had previously planned (I was going to use something called WRF but now I might use a CSIRO developed application called TAPM) or I might borrow some of the WRF model data that a couple of the very smart PhD students in my lab have produced and use this to analyse how accurately WRF can predict the wind speed. Maybe I'll do both.

Just so you know, apparently this is normal. Research students usually spend the first few weeks (months!) of their project basically running around trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I did think (hope) I would be different but if this blog shows anything at all it paints a picture of me not really having a clue about what I am doing, yet.

One day soon, I'll start making significant progress and giving you meaningful updates PLUS I'll start including pictures in my posts to make them more interesting - promise.

Predicting the Wind

At the moment I have centred my reading and researching around the area of my project that I know the best - what sort of wind prediction would the market want?

Obviously, electricity markets vary around the world in relation to the level of government regulation and the technology available on the electricity grid itself. Because of this, there is not likely to be a globally definitive answer for this question. That said, I think that if we were able to deliver a forecast, 3 days in advance which predicted the expected average wind speed for each hour of the day then we would make a few wind farm operators around the world happy.

Now that I have quantified an objective, I feel a lot better about my project. It seems more real and achievable. This could be false optimism on my part however because I have no idea at the moment how this sort of prediction can be achieved, or even if it will be possible.

Week 2

On Thursday I a spent a few hours at uni in the Atmospheric Science lab. It was a bit of a stressful day really initiated by the somewhat unsuccessful orientation session at the daycare centre where Ivy and Reuben will be starting next week.

Reuben was of course fine, as soon as he saw all the kids and toys he was off, playing and making friends. Ivy on the other hand clung to my side as though her life depended on it and screamed like she was being attacked if one of the centre carers came anywhere near her. I thought that she might settle down after a while but one hour later we left the centre with Ivy screaming and whimpering. I didn't think that had done anything different with Ivy to make her clingy but I guess just being around me so much more as a baby than the boys ever were has had a big impact on her. Jack will be dropping her off on Monday morning - I hope it goes better for him.

Anyway, after that rather trying start to the day, I arrived at my desk in the lab to find the lab empty and my computer locked by another users. Not to be perturbed (although I did think of going home for a swim at this point), I moved my stuff into the library and made some pretty good inroads into planning my time and starting to plan my project. Instead of being completely freaked out like I was after last week's meeting, I am now back to being excited about my project and only a little bit nervous about becoming an expert at technical sounding things like next-generation mesoscale numerical weather prediction systems, supercomputers and NCAR command language.

I will be drafting a project proposal over the next few days which will outline exactly what I want to achieve from my research and how I hope to do it. If I like it, I might share some of tit with you. I am also going to start hitting up commercial wind farm operations in south west WA so that I can base my project on real world commercial data.