A picture of me on Specimen Ridge, in Yellowstone National Park. The rock under my arm is a fossilized tree trunk.

NOTE:

Basic Information

NEW STUFF: Blue, an online journal. Expect the random content on this page to become gradually more out of date as I post most of my new stuff to this blog.

Research Projects

• Mid-latitude atmosphere-ocean coupled interactions
  Are the year-to-year changes we see in mid-latitude marine climate due to a coupled interaction between atmosphere and ocean, or are they non-interacting random fluctuations? What sets the geographic shapes of these fluctuations, and their behavior in time?
• Dynamics of "Snowball Earth"
  Geologists have found some evidence that 700 million years ago, the entire surface of our planet might have been frozen over, with glaciers near the equator and an ice sheet covering the entire ocean surface. Is such a climate state physically possible? How easy is it for the climate to move into or out of a "snowball" state? How different are the motions of the atmosphere and ocean during a snowball period?
• Early Mars
  Several billion years ago, Mars seems to have had liquid water running over its surface, implying that it was far warmer than today. Ray Pierrehumbert suggests that this warming might have been achieved by a thick blanket of carbon dioxide, in both gaseous form and in thick dry ice clouds. How does such an unusual atmosphere move, transport and release heat and moisture, and interact with the surface?
• Europan Ocean Dynamics
  Analysis of Voyager and Galileo data suggests that Jupiter's moon Europa might have a thick layer of liquid water beneath its icy crust. If this layer exists, it is warmed by geothermal heat from below. This is a radically different driving force than the Earth's ocean, which is heated by sunlight from above, and pushed by the wind, and it may be similar to the dynamics of the ice-covered ocean of a "Snowball Earth". How does an ocean behave when forced this way? Studies of the motion and energy transport of this hypothetical ocean may help us design observational experiments to discover whether liquid water in fact exists on Europa.

Thesis

Places

Activities

I'm a Techie Emeritus with the MIT Gilbert and Sullivan Players. I've been set designer, tech director, master carpenter, and master electrician, and I was on the Executive Committee in '98-'99. I have some random set-design information for Ruddigore, Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, and Yeomen of the Guard available, as well as MIT set design safety regulations.

I'm a member of the Mad Scientist's Network, a group of people who answer science questions posted by students of all ages. I've also extracted a list of the questions I've answered.

Outdoors, I enjoy hiking, bicycling, playing volleyball, flying stunt kites, and sailing my model sailboat. Indoors, I play board and card games, and build things. In July 2001, I completed a model of a Leonardo da Vinci flying machine. Now that I have a scanner, I'll begin putting up pictures of some of the K'nex models I've built.

Other documents

Photos

• I recently completed a model of a Leonardo da Vinci flying machine. I have lots of photos, plus some construction and design notes.
• Photos of my garden at my apartment.
• Photos of my apartment and workplace in Chicago.
• My father and his friend, Mike Dyer, went to see the a test flight of Helios, NASA's high-altitude, solar-powered aircraft. They took pictures of the event.
• Last Halloween, Denis threw a Halloween gaming party. Here's a photo of me dressed as a zombie fry cook from the game Give Me the Brain. The name tag says "Welcome to Friedey's! My name is Arrrararargh."
• an (unfinished) bunch of photos from a trip to Les Houches, in the Chamonix valley in France, during January 1998. I went for a series of lectures on mathematical methods for studying climate variability.
• Pictures and letters from my research cruise in the Labrador Sea.

Publications, Essays, and Diatribes

• Some thoughts on the reopening of the Statue of Liberty.
• "Hydrothermal Plume Dynamics on Europa: Implications for Chaos Formation." Submitted to Journal of Geophysical Research -- Planets, 2003.
• "An Improved Ice-shell Melting Model for Europa: Implications for Chaos Formation." Submitted to Icarus, 2003.
• "Glacial flow of floating marine ice in `Snowball Earth'", submission to Journal of Geophysical Research -- Oceans, 2002; revised, 2003.
• "The role of neutral singular vectors in middle-latitude air-sea coupling" (2003), Journal of Climate 16, 88-102.
• "Using neutral singular vectors to study low-frequency atmospheric variability" (2002), Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 59, 3206-3222.
• A rant about a Wall Street Journal editorial regarding global warming.
• My thesis again, just in case you missed it last time.
• "A Study of the Interaction of the North Atlantic Oscillation with Ocean Circulation" (2001). Journal of Climate 14, 1399-1421.
• "A Model of Decadal Middle-Latitude Atmosphere-Ocean Coupled Modes (1999) Journal of Climate 12, 621-641.
• My undergraduate senior thesis ("Comps"), on ways to reach Earth orbit without chemical rockets.

Gilbert and Sullivan-related

• www.jwwells.com, your on-line source for necromancy and sorcery. This web site is a take-off on Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Sorcerer", which MITGSP is produced during the fall of 2001.
• "Palm Pirates": Gilbert and Sullivan libretti in DOCbook format for palm PCs. I tend to have G&S songs running through my head all day, and I got sick of not remembering the words.
• A parody of the Pirate King's song from The Pirates of Penzance

Humor and other Creative Work

• The Tree of Life: A Gourmet's Guide
• Interesting ideas I've had over the past few years, some whimsical, some serious. (This hasn't been updated in a long time.)
• A list of scientists and how they might have died.

Pseudo-weekly Photo