I had a paper accepted to the Severe Local Storms conference, an American Meteorological Society conference that is especially for people working on thunderstorms and related phenomena. I presented my research two weeks ago amid talks that ranged from damage surveys from tornados to simulations of tornadogenesis to analysis of radar data from various storms to climatology of severe weather in different regions of the US. The conference had a few hundred attendees, and so was very intimate. I had a chance to talk to all of the attendees, including Dr. David Lewellen from West Virginia, who has focused his work on understanding the basic physics of tornadic flows and their interaction with the surface and debris. He gave me some helpful advice on how to think about my dissertation topic in a more fruitful way.
I tried to make my talk as accessible to meteorologists as possible by including few equations and trying to stay away from the nitty gritty details. Even still, there were a lot of blank stares. I was approached by a scientist working with data, who asked about applying my technique to some tornado data sets, which was very exciting.
Overall, the experience was positive, and I encourage anyone working on interdisciplinary problems to consider presenting their work at a conference in the non-mathematics discipline. I learned a lot of stuff just by listening to all of the radar analysis and damage survey talks. More importantly, I got a sense of what quantities are important to scientists, and what will make their analyses better. Most importantly of all, I came back from the conference with a half dozen research ideas. Now, to finish my degree!
Sean M. R. Crowell 