National Weather Association Annual Conference - Huntsville, Alabama

I attended the 2019 National Weather Association conference in Huntsville, Alabama during early September. The conference was very much oriented toward the social science aspects of meteorology...which I suppose is not a bad thing given my limited experience in the subject. There were some good meteorology talks as well, especially pertaining to Vortex-Southeast. The poster sessions were informative also, and I appreciated the chance to talk one-on-one with experts in subjects ranging from new satellite techniques for detecting wildfires, to new tools for communicating with users of NWS forecasts, to severe thunderstorms initiated by wildfires in the Texas Panhandle, and much much more. But perhaps the highlight of the conference was watching my old Paducah, KY SOO Pat Spoden receive an NWA member of the year award...Pat was a great mentor to me and the rest of the staff at Paducah...way to go Pat!

I was fortunate to reconnect with old friends, such as Carly Kovacik, Walker Ashley, Doug Spheger, Jared Guyer, Bryan Smith, Jeff Peters, and Jeremy Martin...and I'm grateful for the new friends I picked up during the trip while going out to eat for lunch, and grabbing beers during the evening.

I also got a chance to tour downtown Huntsville during my last day in Alabama. The downtown area is beautiful, clean, and lacks the homeless population that plagues my current hometown in Eureka, CA. I walked past the building in which the Alabama Constitution was signed. I also toured the NASA space museum located on the western outskirts of Huntsville, which featured a 2/3-rds scale Space Shuttle parked outside the museum. During my time at NASA, I was privileged to attend a talk by David Concannon, who led a team funded by Jeff Bazos to retrieve the NASA Saturn moon rockets from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. All in all Huntsville is a fantastic place in my opinion...I would have no gripes living and working in northern Alabama.

An assortment of pictures from my trip, which I plan to add captions to--eventually, are posted below.