Alex at Rossbypalooza hackathon at the University of Chicago

PhD student, Alexander Chaudhri, received a £500 travel bursary from SEES to attend the Rossbypalooza hackathon at the University of Chicago. Here's what he made of it all. 

A remarkable event, the Rossbypalooza hackathon is a biannual two-week project-oriented atmospheric physics workshop organised over the preceding 12 months by PhD students in the Geophysical Sciences Department at the University of Chicago. The event is named after meteorologist Carl Gustav Rossby, who contributed foundational understanding of large-scale atmospheric flows, and worked for part of his career in the department in Chicago. This year the focus was on modelling and understanding clouds and convective processes. With funding from UCAR and NSF, the event accepted around 25 postgraduate students and postdocs from outside of Chicago to enter the department and work alongside faculty postgraduate students and staff. 

The hackathon format is based on group work to achieve preliminary results with a fast turnaround. At Rossbypalooza we had one week of lectures from leading academics working around the USA followed by a second week of focused project work culminating in a presentation session, where the groups shared their results. An opportunity to work on problems distinct to our usual research with new people, my group worked on understanding the role of latent heating in contributing to atmospheric blocking events in a two-layer model, while other topics ranged from computational methods for classifying cloud-types from satellite images to theoretical mechanisms for ocean heat transport by geothermal bubbles, and supersonic energy transport in a vapourised magma atmosphere on exoplanets. 

The intense group work, and relatively low-stakes, nature of a hackathon creates an environment of fast paced experimentation, discussion, and idea generation. This format delivered a series of presentations of novel research, with preliminary results that open new questions for further investigation. Such events draw together researchers with experience on a diversity of topics, who may not otherwise get an opportunity to work together, to share their methods and produce work at a high standard. I was able to addend thanks to a travel bursary grant from SEES to cover my travel costs.