AGU2013 was full of good feedback this year – from q-q plots to the role of the ITCZ in modulating ENSO variability to having less text on your poster (!).  Even the feedback from the OSPA was useful, if not terribly complete or consistent.  According to that,  I am personable and a good presenter, and my research is both important and holds up.  However, I’m either very good or very bad at answering questions, and may or may not be very  knowledgeable on the subject matter – the two results were complete opposites, so I’m not sure how to take it aside from “know more so there’s never a question”.  The third result would have helped to constrain the uncertainty!  One thing that is certain is that, now that the results seem to be interesting and compelling, I need to focus more on the larger climate context of the results.  While it takes a lot of effort just to generate results, analysis of the results is another large project, and one of the downsides of being an experimentalist is missing the forest for the trees.  Last year, many of the questions that I was faced with were of the statistical nature – were my statistics robust, were they appropriate, and what other kinds of statistical analysis I could be doing to either support or disrupt my conclusions.  This year, the questions were all about mechanism – if we indeed see the changes that we do, why? Why would ENSO vary in the MCA? Is this a direct result of dynamical effects from increased solar forcing, or is this related to ITCZ changes, or both, or neither, or is this a result of internal variability?  I discussed this at length with some folks (thanks Alyssa!) during my poster session, and my New Years Reading List has gotten considerably longer.

 

Anyway, here’s a tiny little PDF of the poster.  I’ll add some more later.

AGU-Rustic-Koutavas-2013-final