I was bullied and harassed on Facebook.

Online harassment and gas lighting are fearful experiences that many of us struggle to speak in public. I recently got verbally abused, threatened, and harassed on Facebook for posting an ad in Facebook Marketplace. My initial feelings were shame and fear. I hid from the social media. I discussed with close friends. Finally, when I researched resources on online bullying, I came across more articles that highlighted similar issues in Facebook market place.  

I'm sharing my experience here because getting harassed online is terrifying and harmful actions of cyber bullying are NEVER OKAY. No one has to go through it alone. I hope my post can help others with similar issues express their honest emotions without shame or fear. 

Dec 17, 2021 : I posted about a room rental in Facebook market place. A few people messaged me to inquire more details. Few others did not like the price I had quoted. They started abusing me in comments and when I turned off commenting on my post, they flooded me with direct messages in Facebook Market Place that included verbal abuse of me and my cat and some threatening statements that shook my day. 

I reported a few of those messages and deleted the post (if I were to do it again, I would leave it there for documentation). After I reported a few posts that involved negative, harmful content, I discovered Fb locked my account. 

Cyber bullying is a common experience. Common advice is to ignore it (personal experience). Although there is an option to block people in case of harassment, if this event involves not merely an individual, but a group of strangers, it is not trivial to track down every profile and block them. 

I firmly believe any form of bullying/harassment that leaves a traumatic footprint in us is worth bringing to light, so it can motivate others to share their stories about online bullying. Our emotions matter!

New Books Added to My Shelf

 

• 1. Get Out of Your Own Way - Mark Goulston (Early morning quick read or late night musings. Provides feasible actions to overcome self-sabotage)

  - https://www.amazon.com/Get-Out-Your-Own-Self-Defeating/dp/0399519904

  2. The Cafe on the Edge of the World - John Strelecky (Short-read, an interesting mix of fiction and philosophy).

  - https://www.amazon.com/Cafe-Edge-World-Story-Meaning-ebook/dp/B08JXJS6QZ

  3. Supernormal - Meg Jay (An extraordinary read. Powerful tales that show how we sometimes hide our deepest emotions by putting a brave face. The author challenges that you can't read it without seeing yourself in it.)

  - https://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Untold-Story-Adversity-Resilience/dp/1455559156

  
  

  Best-loved : Get Out of Your Own Way by Mark Goulston. Here is an brief review.

  
  

  Ever wondered what are the most common reasons for basic emotions like procrastination, anger, and fear that sabotage peace? Mark Goulston's "Get Out Of Your Own Way" is a 200-page crash therapy session on self-defeating behaviors. The book teems with anecdotes and usable insights absent of long philosophical discussions.

  
  

  Each chapter is short, 4-5 pages long. Get Out Of Your Own Way provides practical lessons for conquering self-defeating behaviors.
  
  

  Some of my favorite quotes and usable insights from the book :
  "We promise according to our hope and perform according to our fears" - Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld.
  
  
  "You have to admit that you feel bad before you can feel better".
  
  
  "We forgive when we no longer need to blame; we forget when we no longer need to remember".
  
  
  " We procrastinate not because we are lazy, but because we are lonely. "
  
  
  
  
  Another book by the author that caught my eye -"Talking to 'Crazy': How to Deal with the Irrational and Impossible People in Your Life". I think I should have started with this book 😉

Poetry from the land of waves

A storm is brewing 

Dancing and Shoaling in the fiery seas,

The waves finally embrace the rocky shores.

O listen! Mighty and the tall, young and the aged, swell and the windsea!

All break and retreat. 

So is it now all this show to exit? 

As if the silence was broken only to end in a fading foam,

Leaving behind a footprint among the worlds' sands. 

I walked up the shore, sans pride, sans grief. 

Aish

Dec 26, 2020

Witnessing brush fires in Hawaii : A vacation that turned out extra adventurous

Day started with blissful Hawaiian dresses and flowers and turned out to be one of the most adventurous days of my visit in the Hawaiian island, Maui. As wind gusts rocked the cars in traffic, I witnessed a brush fire that spread all across the mountains and burnt around 500 acres in a span of a few hours. After a long ordeal of four hours in traffic, so grateful to be back in the hotel with food and water. Fires, still flaming!

Hawaii, a land of waves and volcanoes is also home to wildfires and brush fires that occur due to natural or human activities.     

The brush fire on December 27, 2020 started around 5.30 pm, Hawaiian Standard Time (HST) (https://www.kitv.com/story/43102416/maui-red-cross-opens-shelter-in-olowalu-area) and spread across the mountains along the Lahaina-Kihei highway. Traffic came to a stand still as everyone watched the fires light up the mountains and the trees near the road on fire in awe. As the fires spread on the windward and leeward side of the mountains, the smoke drastically reduced the visibility. 

I got  curious if that was captured from space :) Well, wearing a Pollyanna attitude here 😉

Fig 1: Fire domain in the state of Hawaii (Top: Hawaiian islands, Middle: Maui island, Bottom: Lahaina-Kihei highway (HI-30) in Maui island. source : https://mesowest.utah.edu/)

Fig 2: Graphic showing Maui island and fire spot in red (Source : Fire Information for Resource Management System, FIRMS : https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/)

Fire hotspots were captured by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument onboard the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) spacecraft, 375m and NASA Terra/Aqua MODIS instruments. 

GOES-R image of the fires are not yet clear. I also quickly pulled out some Weather research and forecasting model forecast from Pacific Island Ocean Observing System. 

Fig 3: WRF Forecast of wind speed from https://www.pacioos.hawaii.edu/weather/model-wind-hawaii/ (Model runs not personally evaluated)

The story is still shaping up. More later, as the satellites pass over Maui in the morning. 

In the work from home era, I read books :)

 "The only certainty is that life is uncertain!"
- Susan Jeffers

Of course, we already know that. But, the hard reality is that we endure in all ways possible, in all areas of our lives, to avoid this truth. Being able to do a lot of soul searching during the quarantine this year, I have found myself reading more short bursts of Psychology. One collection that has attracted me so much in the recent past is Susan Jeffers's EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY. 

In a bold feat of imagination and courage, this book gives flesh and emotion to a realization: Deep acceptance of the nature of life that there is no way to create certainty in life. 

The book unfurls from many angles about the fear of admiring the wonderment of life, which is the unknown. It is interesting to see how Susan pokes at bigger questions like 'how would you choose to live if you are not afraid of the unknown', 'what if you don't try to erase the uncertainty every second, rather embrace it' with simple sentences and light language. Lol, the author throws an emotional punch when she asserts the only way to enjoy life is to take a good seat in the theater and let the chapters unfold without having an urge to perfectly control everything. 

What sets this book apart from the common psychology books I have read are the glimpses into real life scenarios, exercises, and practical tools that we can utilize to take a step towards embracing uncertainty. What really caught my heart is a sentence from the book: 'Life is beautiful not despite these uncertainties, but because of these uncertainties'. 

Introducing Aurora, my kitten

Aurora is 5 months old and loves biting whatever moves, including hands and feet :P

Extremely social, loves Indian food, pasta, and mango lassy (No, I don't feed her Indian food, she licks them when I'm not looking). She is not a big fan of anything healthy :P. 

Everyone in my inner circle is her fan and my mom still thinks she poops everywhere in the house and she cannot find the litter box. Nope, that's not true. She is extremely disciplined. That's just my mom's irrational fear for cats. 

My office chair at home is her throne. She is usually kind enough to allow me to sleep on the corner of bed. She likes to sleep at the center and due to my fear that I might accidentally roll over her, I try to sleep at the edge 😂. Her toys are her toys only and my teddy bears are her toys too. Only sound she immediately responds to is the one from opening the wet food can. 

Poetry at 30,000 feet

Where the mind doesn't meet the heart 

Into the night as I go,

To the glory of the heart 

And the song of the lights

I surrender the pain. 

Wandering through the air,

Feeling the vacuum inside,

I have come so far from home

Yet, so close to the light. 

Dazzling charm and shimmer

Don't offer solace

For peace is not in words

Yet, silence is unsettling!

To the birds and the foe,

I treat you just the same.

Deeper the wounds, farther the home. 

For I have come so far from home. 

In the beauty of the mind lies the end of the darkness

Yet the mind doesn't feel the pain. 

Fear the wisdom, says the heart!

Will I ever be enough, says the mind!

Both play a game with either of them losing to one another. 

Piercing the dark deep musings, 

The mind brings out its beauty. 

And the heart, surrenders quietly.

Into the nights as I go. 

~ Aish

11/17/2020. 

Lovely fall - this time, from across the country

Hello and happy fall, from Maryland.

It has been a month surrounded by greenness, fall colors, small towns, and Bruno Mars :) The blue sky and the beaches ; small towns and the crab cakes ; museums and the history; it has been an adventurous swing into the fall!

I love masquerade balls. I always thought it's a place where you can hide a little from the familiar world and perhaps introduce yourself as Princess Consuela of your own castle. For me, past two months has been a similar exotic experience in Maryland with a new castle, scenary, people, and a dream job. While finding a new castle can be exciting, it was also terrifying to move across the country and go far away from the cacti world :) However, after two months, I'm slowly starting to love this place. I now have my go-to places here. The waterfront in the Georgetown, the National mall with the Washington Monument standing tall and surrounded by a rich and immense expanse of museums, small towns like Greenbelt, Frederick, and Bowie that are joyous vibrant hotspots where it's holiday season every weekend. 

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center - To talk satellites everyday and see images from even the distant parts of the universe in NASA's hyperwall (23 ft wide and 10 ft high LCD screen that displays images/movies of varying themes every day. Last I checked, it was methane ice on Pluto captured by New Horizons mission ), it has been the most humbling experience of my life. I work at the Earth sciences division with the Goddard Modeling and Assimilation Office. I study the hurricanes using satellites and numerical models. Changing gears and working on hurricanes after spending my Ph.D in the aerosol world also makes me appreciate the beauty of data density from satellites for weather and availability of information at different altitudes (for those who don't work on aerosols - the information on particles is very limited when compared to weather data products and very few observations hold clues to what kind of particles exist at different altitudes). 

What if someone told me 6 years back, "move across the country and all your dreams are just waiting to come true"  - ah ! 

A picture from a beautiful small town in Maryland - Carroll creek park, Frederick. 

More later !

AEROSOLS : What Do They Have to Do With The Indian Heat Wave 2015? - PART 2

“Jet streams and Jet meandering can be linked to extreme events like heat waves”, remarked one of the seminar speakers at Atmo. It struck me, “What could be the causes of the extreme heat wave in India in summer 2015? Is there a link between  jet stream patterns n stuffs n heat waves?”, raced my mind…But, no really, I’m not an expert in general circulation or dynamics. I work on Air pollution. I was wondering, what the current data from satellites can tell me about Indian heat wave and its link to Aerosols. Ah , I hear you, if you had read my previous post, you should go, ‘Duh! Aerosols, do have an impact on local weather’.

I started delving into the details… (in my advisor’s terminology, ‘extracting science from the vast varieties of ugly data’). 

The major heat wave struck the southern India in the latter half of May 2015. You can see the impact of heat wave from the outgoing IR radiation picture below (More the emitted IR radiation, hotter the place). I picked a small region (red boxed) in the southern India near Andhra pradesh.

Outgoing longwave radiation from TERRA satellite(NASA Earth observatory : http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=85986)

Red boxed region in the Image is the study area in India. This is in the state called 'Andhra Pradesh'. I made some quick analyses of this event and how aerosols can be linked to heat wave below: 

Some initial interesting results :

1. NCEP NCAR reanalysis (Ok, to put it simpler, these are gridded data that combine information from weather models and ground/satellite observations and produce pretty maps J) maps near Andhra Pradesh show cooler anomalies every two years. Here is a snapshot of May month average anomaly maps from 2010 – 2015. The anomalies in the intermittent years are really high and 2015 is one of them.

2010 NCEP NCAR surface temperature anomaly for May 

2011 May anomaly 

2012 May anomaly 

2013 May anomaly

2014 May anomaly 

2015 May anomaly 

2. When the sensor AIRS on board Aqua satellite flew over India, it watched the heat wave temperatures. Here, we are looking at the time averaged surface temperature for the month of May in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015. The biennial pattern (“HOT YEAR-HOT YEAR-COLD YEAR; HOT-HOT-COLD”) shown by NCEP NCAR reanalysis data is also reflected in in the regions extending between 16N-18N and 77E – 84E. Look at the red boxed region shown in the first image. 

2010 May mean surface temperature 

2011 May surf_temp

2012 May surf_temp

2013 May surf_temp

2014 May surf_temp

2015 May surf_temp

3. Zooming in on 2015 and comparing it against one of the relatively cold summer, 2011 (I mean, less warmer….ooosh, it’s tropics!), we can see that the latter half of May 2015 was much hotter and 13 days showed temperatures more than 50⁰C. The mean of May 15-30 , 2015 is higher than 2011.

2011 May, Timeseries of daytime surface temperature from AIRS sensor  for the boxed region

2015 May (heat wave year), Timeseries of daytime surface temperature from AIRS sensor for the boxed region

 4. Let’s see how this is linked to aerosols or suspended particles in the atmosphere. In this context, satellites look down on Earth and see how much turbid the atmosphere is or how thick is the layer of aerosols in the atmospheric column extending from surface (caveat!) until the top of the atmosphere. Here, I show aerosol loadings seen from a UV sensor (OMI) onboard the Aqua. The spatial maps of UV aerosol index (representing mostly dust and smoke) are shown below for May 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 (once again, focus on the boxed region that was pointed above in the initial figure in red). 

If you look closer on the monthly average aerosol loading for May from OMI, starting from 2010 until 2015, voila! Does the pattern seem familiar? We see the distinct biennial pattern here as well! (High aerosol loading – high aerosol loading – cold. 2010 is high, 2011 cold, 2012, 2013, high, 2014, cold, 2015 is high).

To me, it looks like a promising link - Biennial patterns in increase in surface temperature patterns (hot hot cold) and aerosol loadings (high loading, high, low). What are the probable aerosols that could impact the intensity of heat waves, if the results here, hold good? See you in my next blog..

Thanks for reading! 

AEROSOLS : What Do They Have to Do With The Indian Heat Wave 2015?

That was a tense Indian summer which intense heat waves smashing the country. What makes it “record breaking”?

Delhi roads melting due to intense heat waves (abc7news.com)

See this? Petrified? So was I…The intense episode of 2015 Indian heat wave hit the list of top 5 deadliest heat waves! This is not new though. So, you ask, why are we talking about this now if this has been a tradition in India, every summer?

Guess what?? “Recent increase in the frequency, persistency, and spatial coverage of heat waves when compared to 1970s”, quote a few articles. This could be a close resemblance to more intense heat waves in future.

In general, heat waves are affected by numerous factors ranging from large scale meteorological patterns and local aerosol effects. What intrigued me was the effect of aerosols on these heat waves in Indian megacities like Delhi and Hyderabad.

You ask, who cares about the small particles that exist less than a week?…Now, walk outside, lift your eyes, watch the beautiful sky if you are lucky… most likely , if you are like most of us, living in megacities, you might be looking out on veil of smoggy particles or coarse dust and pollen.. And that’s what I’m talking about – AEROSOLS ! 

Aerosol sources (Image courtesy : caice.ucsd.edu)

That got me thinking about some specific questions and hypothetical reasoning regarding the heat waves in Delhi and Hyderabad.

a) ‘How local effects of pollutants, especially, aerosols (e.g. dust, black carbon particles) alter the intensity of heat waves?

Hypothesis: Well, this is a familiar one. Aerosols like Black Carbon (BC : in simple terms, the smoke you see in a burning candle and the black smoke you see out of a vehicle hold BC particles.) absorb radiation from the atmosphere and re-emit that radiation and transfer the heat back to the atmosphere. This can act like a SELF AMPLIFYING EFFECT to the heat waves, therefore increasing their intensities.

b) Now, let’s take a step back and turn the question around. Imagine this sweltering heat and lower wind speeds which is usually the case during heat waves, what happens to aerosols in that region? They accumulate due to lower wind speeds. If they are absorbing aerosols like BC, they have a feedback to the heat waves, THUS CAUSING THE SELF AMPLIFYING EFFECT.  

Delhi, being a megacity, the effects of increased urbanization can cause wind stagnation and low horizontal transport of pollutants.

C) What is the probability of a year experiencing a heat wave in the study area given the local effects of aerosols?

If we consider this aerosol heat wave feedback into the system, will the heat wave intensity significantly increase in future years, if we increase the load of aerosols?

Well, in terms of global warming, these are much familiar questions. We know human induced pollution has a huge impact on surface temperature changes across the globe. But, what appears as a tangential question is, “how do these short lived pollutants affect the intensity of episodic heat waves that last only for a couple of weeks?”

I’ll let you guess the details until a later post how these hypotheses can be tied to the Indian heat wave case study in Delhi.

A poet's pen in a scientist's hand

Last semester of coursework, and I was writing my final exam for one of the courses. It was just not yet another exam. It was different! It was unfolding something interesting and had its own style. I will tell you how.

How often we end up reading a question in an exam and smiling to ourselves ? How often we see something like , " Pick a topic from the course and write a poem" and feel a poet's pen in a scientist's hand?  I got reminded of those days when I used to blog poems. I carefully wheeled through a list of topics in mind and settled down for "RuBisCO - An enzyme responsible for photosynthesis".

RuBisCO

" Dancing and wandering in the wind,
          There fell a lone leaf,
   Resilient in its nature,
           Poignant in its form,
   Little does it know about its heart,
          That yearns to bind with CO2 and O2.


Converting every energy wave to sugar,
       Binding every molecule into Calvin cycle,
For oft, little does the lone leaf know its soul,
      Thy name is Rubisco. "