About This Site
My name is Erin Thead, and I hold a Ph. D. in Earth & Atmospheric Sciences from Mississippi State University. My Master's degree is in meteorology, and my undergraduate degree is in software engineering. I have combined the two fields of study for my research. My Master's thesis was about the use of a statistical learning machine algorithm to forecast lightning, and my dissertation was about uncertainty analysis in deterministic model ensembles of severe weather outbreak forecasts. My ultimate career goal is to be a scientist who is involved in science policy matters, including research funding, natural disaster issues, and environmental policy (including climate change). I currently work for the National Weather Service's Meteorological Development Laboratory as a contract employee with AceInfo Solutions, and I have written on a voluntary basis for the Climate Institute. The views I express on this website are mine alone.
This is my personal website and two blogs. PolitiCalypso is my personal, political, and culture blog. Synoptic Flow is my weather blog. Everything I have written that I host at this domain is my opinion alone and should not be construed to reflect the positions of current, former, or future employers. I custom-built the main site—that is to say, the site that you are reading—and the WordPress theme for the blogs, and I maintain everything on this site independently. The main website contains mostly creative work that I have done relating to subjects that interest me, and the time frame for the work spans over a decade.
For more information about me, visit my About Me page.