ErinThead.com

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About This Site

My name is Erin Thead, and I am a doctoral student in Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at Mississippi State University. (This is my own web site, though; they have nothing to do with the content or the hosting.) My Master's degree is in meteorology, and my undergraduate degree is in software engineering. I have combined the two fields of study for my research. My Master's thesis was about the use of a statistical learning machine algorithm to forecast lightning, and my dissertation will be about some aspect of the topic of numerical weather modeling. After I complete my doctorate, I hope to work at a national weather/climate research lab.

This is my personal website and two blogs. PolitiCalypso is my personal, political, and culture blog. Synoptic Flow is my weather blog. Neither blog is frequently updated anymore, because doctoral dissertation work occupies a lot of a person's time, but this may change in the future, so the blogs are not going anywhere. I custom-built the main site—that is to say, the site that you are reading—and the WordPress theme for the blogs, and I maintain everything on this site independently. The main website contains mostly creative work that I have done relating to subjects that interest me, and the time frame for the work spans over a decade.

For more information about me, visit my About Me page.

View the News Archive

On Synoptic Flow

Was the Joplin Tornado the Deadliest We Can Expect?

31 Dec 2011

Meteorologists and weather-watchers are bidding the year 2011 a less-than-fond farewell. While it was certainly a banner year from the point of view of storm chasing—6 EF-5 tornadoes, 17 EF-4s, and many of them highly photogenic, as the dozens of home videos on Youtube illustrate—it was a catastrophe in terms of the human impact. With [...]

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Go to Synoptic Flow

On PolitiCalypso

Thoughts On SOPA

18 Jan 2012

I’m not blacking out my website. Color me jaded, cynical, or whatever adjective you choose—if it’s a synonym of that general sort, it’s almost certainly correct—but I just don’t have much—no, any—faith in the effectiveness of boycotts or protests. That’s part of the reason why I’m not taking part in this. I’m not going to [...]

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Go to PolitiCalypso

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