I
am Zeljka Fuchs-Stone, but as my name is so complicated, I suggest you think of
me as as “Z” – even my kids do sometimes. Together with Dave Raymond I am
leading the OTREC project. How exciting!
A
bit about me and my field project background… I have been flying on research
planes since my graduate years. My very first flight experience completely
changed the way I looked at my work. All of a sudden instead of sitting in my
office, scribbling equations on paper I got to SEE, measure, process and analyze
what I am studying. I was hooked for life!
Today
I am a Research Professor and the Director of the Climate and Water Consortium
at New Mexico Tech where I also got my PhD and where guess who was my adviser –
Dave Raymond. After my PhD I went back home to Croatia where I spent almost a
decade as a Professor at the University of Split. However, every opportunity I
had, I used to come back to New Mexico Tech.
Here
we come to the moment in time when OTREC was thought out. It was a Sunday
evening, a few years ago. I was sitting with Dave R. having beer after our
usual Sunday yoga (well, usual when I was in town). And on that particular
Sunday I was reminiscing about my life, complaining a bit of being bored, or to
put it more nicely, complaining of a lack of challenges in my life. The kids
were behaving at the time, yeah right (I have three, honestly when I had them I
forgot that they will become teenagers?!? – I do have a PhD in physics, hm...).
Anyway, all of a sudden Dave says, let’s do an international field project,
maybe that will help with your boredom. And the next few hours were spent
talking science and at the end of that evening we had a skeleton for OTREC!!!
OTREC
aims to sample various stages of convection and I hope that we will collect the
best data set for the Eastern Pacific and Southwest Caribbean atmosphere, one
that will tell us why the storms form and why some intensify into hurricanes.
More
about me at:
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