https://forecastpod.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/episode_40_bill_boos.mp3

Bill Boos and I have something in common. Neither of us is much of a long-term planner, but we both like to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. For me, this approach led to a switch from academia to editing. For Bill, it led to an in-process move from Yale to UC Berkeley.

09-07-BBoos-06b.jpg" alt="BBoos" width="644" height="966">Credit: Tony Fiorini

Bill’s career had plenty of twists and turns along the way. Namely, we almost lost him to the dark side … a career in financial consulting at Anderson (now Accenture). Happily, that path didn’t prove sufficiently interesting, and Bill landed in a terminal one-year MS program at MIT, where he started his work with Kerry Emanuel. Except it wasn’t so terminal.

Post-graduation, Bill checked out the professional job market, but quickly found that:

The best job that I’ve interviewed for is not as interesting as staying in graduate school

Things started to click with Kerry, and Bill pursued work on fairly theoretical ocean and atmospheric dynamics. But soon after graduation he published a landmark paper suggesting that a strong Indian monsoon can be generated solely by the presence of the Himalayas: no Tibetan Plateau required. I found the paper fascinating when I handled it at Nature, and it certainly stirred things up in the monsoon community.

As I’ve mentioned on the show in the past, monsoons are endlessly vexing: tantalizing but ephemeral teleconnections; busted predictions; monstrous interannual variability; conceptually simple but terribly complex in the details. One approach to disentangling the mess might be, as Bill puts it, to start off with a clear null-hypothesis:

Can we disprove the hypothesis that this year-to-year variability is just random and we’ll never be able to predict it?

Answering the question would inevitably take a renewed focus on observations, a deep dive into reconstructing past variability, and improved dynamical understanding.

One area of low-hanging fruit — or at least fruit that could be reached by a long extension pole, perhaps while teetering at the top of a rickety three-meter wooden ladder, the base of which has long been under assault by termites — is monsoon depressions. These systems, a topic of much research in the 1970s-1980s, don’t look that horrendous in comparison to typhoons, but end up generating some of the most destructive storms. Why? Bill would like to know. Me too.