Phew!
I’ll soon be the new “Sales/Application Engineer” at Sea Bird Electronics in Bellevue Washington.
They’re the world gold standard for oceanographic sensors of temperature and salinity, the two super-key parameters that seem to drive and be driven by Mysterious Macro Climatological Transport Phenomena, and thus super-important for trying to better understand just what the heck the global climate is doing, and what it will do.
(The ocean has 1000X the heat capacity of the atmosphere, so it has forever been “the elephant in the room” of meteorology.)
Given the supercomputers we have, they’re just needing the right data to be able to look ahead into rainfall predictions and recommend whether Indiana (or Oaxaca or Vietnam or Zambia, etc) should plant corn or beans next year, and why, and when. Atmospheric weather starts in the ocean, and this stuff is life and death for a lot of people, so better to see what’s coming as far ahead as possible.
(To add efficiency one must also add complexity, and the science of oceanography is the complexity in question here.)
What’s interesting is that this company was the first to deliver these sensors pre-calibrated to an almost baroquely exacting standard. I’ve seen their calibration facilties (10X more floor space than where they actually make the things), so I know. It’s like James Bond in there… low-budget fluorescent-lit worn-out-carpet James Bond.
So by being a source for perfectly-calibrated sensors, new scales of partnerships between institutions and governments are being made possible. Before, everybody bought cheap sensors and calibrated them in their own way, so no one trusted the other guy’s data. When the “other guy’s data” is also the “other 80% of the data available”, well that really Balkanized the science in a bad way.
But we’re fixing that. I’ll be helping these institutions figure out which sensors they need for various kinds of science they’re doing, and help them understand how to use it.
And another thing… I’m not coding software! Woohoo! Permanent vacation!
And it’s not weapons either! Get out!
Longshot City 
June 18, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Congrats! Especially in this job market.