Write Like you Speak

Return after a long absence!

I read a blog post today on Seth Godin's blog that suggested people should write every day. We speak well because we practice that without much criticism. We should endeavor to do the same with writing. And that we should write SOMETHING every single day. As scientific writing in particular has been a bit difficult for me lately, I have decided to try writing just a paragraph or so about what I am thinking about current results and perhaps that will lead to better insights than I get when I try not to think of my work outside of the office.
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So far, the backward-in-time-trajectories (BITTs) are showing that in most cases, and with the exception of very few particles in year 2001, eggs are not originating at or beyond the shelf break (here defined as 180m isobath). There are some concerns I have with this so far:

1. I worry that the temperature at the surface (surface particles are the ones making it closest to the break in the 2001 run)are too high, and that means that particles are not traveling for as long as they probably would beotherwise before backward-developing to zero-age, or spawning. 
2. I worry that the random walk is actually slowing the particles -- well, I know that is sort of the case, the particles spread more instead of traveling directly with currents -- and I don't know how accurate that is in terms of real dynamics.
3. Advection-only forward-in-time (FITT) runs in year 2001 showed particles reaching NH05. I don't know if this is because of the random walk issue stated above, or it if has to do with the fact that particles are seeded from 10-170m depth all along 2 degrees latitude of the shelf break and there are more possibilities being presented. With the BITT runs, I only have 2600 particles, and those are really two classes, age-based, so I essentially am looking at only 1300 possibilities. However, in the FITT runs, I have 4097 particles, and each of those represents a distinct flow history. Perhaps this is a method error. I could increase the number of particles in the BITT runs and see if there is a difference. 

Thats it for now. Still lots of uncertainty, and still running the FITT simulations for other years. Next steps will be to plot 1999-2004 and see if perhaps 2001 is an anomaly in the FITT results. That would be an encouraging outcome, since 2001 is also an anomaly in the BITT results.