Climate and Weather

Given my last entry was about the weather, I wanted to be sure and point out that some of our funny weather is because of one of the short, fascinating cycles in the climate (something that climate skeptics often confuse is weather and climate). Seems we are going through a La Niña this winter, which should mean in general drier and warmer weather for Georgia. However, we also got a really nice snowfall late on December 25, so maybe we can have the best of both worlds for the next few months: good weather punctuated by beautiful snow!? I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

In the meantime, these oscillations in sea surface temperatures in the equatorial oceans keep me thinking of my barnacles down in Chile. I’ve just gotten word that the next shipment is about to arrive, just in time for new technician Kelly Laughlin to start in the lab. She will be working with others in the lab to get these specimens prepped for our Illumina next-generation sequencing efforts, hopefully to be done by March. My goal of March is set partly by what can be done by my colleagues down south, and partly by what I’m hoping people like student Christina Zakas can do before graduating, which is to help teach me all her tricks for SNP discovery and genome organization!