AMS in the Big Easy

Two weeks ago I attended my sixth Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society: a time of seeing old friends, making new research contacts, and experiencing great advances in atmospheric science research. Thanks to the AMS meeting planners, it also means I get to take in culture! This year the AMS meeting was in New Orleans, LA, home of beignets and plantations and great music and food. Enjoy the pictures!

Our conference center was right on the riverwalk, which made for pretty walking breaks. The Mississippi was really high because of flooding along the river in places like St. Louis, and river managers actually opened up some sort of river diversion for only the third time since 1930! It's amazing to look at the Mississippi River on one side of the riverwalk and look down to the city (about 10ft below sea level) on the other side.

Famed beignets of Cafe du Monde, drenched in powdered sugar and oh so delicious.

Cafe du Monde! Not pictured: pigeons who really wanted some of our beignets.

Jackson Square, with St. Louis Cathedral in the background. Jackson Square was completely surrounded by artists selling their street art!

Inside St Patrick Church, where I went to church.

A hawk decided our hotel was a great place to be...

...and he was right! Our hotel used to be apartments, so the inside looked like this. I really appreciated the greenery!

I feel obliged to include conference pictures, since that was the main impetus behind this trip. This was a panel discussion during the Conference for Early Career Professionals. If you're a grad student and you're reading this, come to our conference next year and join the board when you graduate!

Many exciting and important companies come to the conference and display their wares (the latest and greatest in tech innovations, satellite missions, etc.) in the exhibit hall. Science on a Sphere is always really neat - everything rotates and moves around the sphere like a spinning globe!

NASA had pretty sweet visualizations too.

So. Many. Posters.

Our home away from home: the convention center. Despite being on the river, this region didn't experience much in the way of flooding during Katrina - the most damage occurred near the big industrial canal and Lake Ponchartrain, where pumps and levees failed.

Maybe the most exciting part of my trip (sorry boss!) was the plantation tour! We got to stop in at the swamp tour place to pick up more tourists.

I got to hold a baby alligator!! This guy was was about 2 years old; they are full grown at about 50 years old. You can tape their mouths shut because they don't have much strength in opening - it's all in biting power.

Along the River Road, about from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, plantations used to line the Mississippi. Often the properties stretched back into swamp, which contained a lot of the cypress wood they used to build their plantation houses. The plantation I visited (yellow section at the bottom center of the map, marked "Duparc and Locoul") was originally 6 miles long, but not nearly as wide. They had 3-5 ft levees where their land met the river, but nothing like what they have today (something like 24 feet).

I toured Laura: A Creole Plantation, one of the best historical plantation tours in the country according to travel guides, and it completely lived up to the hype! The house is restored to look as much as possible like it did in the 1800s and early 1900s. Creole (a culture defined as French-speaking, native-born, and Catholic) plantations were different from American plantations. First, they were brightly painted as opposed to the Americans' white plantation houses. Second, they faced the river and were built with a layout (complete with totally open lower floor) that inspired airflow - crucial to survival in the deep South summers.

Interestingly, plantation homes were not considered lavish. They were places of business, not fanciful French Quarter social season homes. That fireplace that looks like marble? Cypress, painted to look like marble. Cypress was favored because it doesn't rot with moisture, and the homes were built with 500-1000 year old cypress wood found in the swamps. That wood was so hard that termites preferred to go elsewhere!

View from the wraparound porch out to the kitchens and some other buildings. Pillars on the ground show previous wings that haven't been rebuilt, but were part of the airflow-inducing floorplan. The homes didn't actually have interior hallways; all rooms were accessible via the porch.

Some of the beautiful land and slave cabins. As many as 190 slaves worked here before the Civil War, and many returned after they were freed because it was all they knew, or they weren't skilled enough to branch out. 

After the tour, our lovely tourguide let us explore the river road a bit. A long paved bike path runs along it, so we went for a short walk. Note the swollen Mississippi River to the left!

Oak Alley plantation is the plantation to visit if you want to learn about some film history and see just about the prettiest thing around. We couldn't go in since we didn't pay for that tour, but you can get the general picture.

Just the most ridiculously picturesque scene, right here.

Mmmmmm-hmm! I'd film my movie here, no doubt.

I had to grab Starbucks and Subway once or twice during the conference because of limited breaks. To make up for it, I got an alligator po'boy on my last night! And you know what? It was scrumptious.