Arizona, phoenix and ASU

This is Kosame writing again haha

After I finished AGU24 in Washington, DC, I also headed to Phoenix, Arizona to meet up with an old friend of ours, Moiz !

Moiz is now working as a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University, and as one of my mentors and a good friend, I felt I had to seize the opportunity to meet him in the United States.

About Arizona, Phoenix and Tempe

Unlike Washington, D.C., far to the east, Arizona is located in the southwest of the United States, and the Colorado River runs through the state until it empties into the Gulf of California in Mexico.

The Arizona State University I visited is located in Phoenix, the capital city of Arizona, which is also the fifth largest city in the United States.

Mention of Arizona, can not be separated from the Grand Canyon and that bright deep red, as if mixed with purple sunset color is the name card of the state.

According to Moiz, the best season in Phoenix is winter, different from the summer when the temperature is more than 40 degrees, the winter here has been maintained at about 25 degrees, and the air is far from dry, it can be said to be quite pleasant.

The sky here is always blue, and the towering red mountains and the oasis of the city together constitute a blue - red - green color of the city landscape.

What a place.

About ASU

Arizona State University (ASU) is a public research university in the United States. Its educational philosophy is "first-class education, no one is forgotten", committed to providing students with quality education and promoting social development.

ASU's hydrology program is particularly suited for students interested in water management in arid regions, climate change adaptation, and interdisciplinary research. Its strong research centres and practical projects provide students with a wealth of learning and practical opportunities, particularly in the areas of urban water management and hydrological sustainability.

My first impression of it was a huge oasis in the middle of a red desert. The whole campus is very large, and the greening is meticulous and neat, and you can feel that every grass, tree, flower and tree in the campus are carefully and seriously treated. The convenient transportation and convenience stores everywhere give me the illusion that I am not in the United States. Coincidentally, I arrived at the time of the official graduation season for American college students. The campus is full of graduates taking graduation photos.

ASU is indeed full of beauty and dignity.

About our meet

Moiz and I haven't seen each other in a year, and while we maintain at least a bi-weekly online meeting, it's much more enjoyable to see someone in person and have a face-to-face conversation.

Moiz showed me a lot of research done by teachers and students in his school. They were all very "Solid". I felt that they were all very practical and novel. For instance, Moiz is working on identifying drought signals in Arizona. hourly and 1km data are used for analysis to analyze how drought conditions change in Arizona, and the entire research data are open access. The NOAA National Water Model CONUS Retrospective Dataset, Neural hydrology and other new technologies with open access are all very exciting. 

The most striking thing is that most of the research here is combined with machine learning, using machine learning to analyze rainfall, analyze water quality and so on. These are built on top of the Supercomputing Center (SOL) provided by ASU, which provides a total of 21,000 CPUs and 290 A100 Gpus, and students and faculty at school can obtain a virtual computing environment at any time upon request. This is quite surprising.

At the end

I have to say, it's been a short time, but I like Phoenix better than Washington, DC. Love it for its canyon fortitude and its oasis of vitality. Considering that both TSMC and Intel are building new factories in Phoenix, I think technology will be synonymous with the city's future.

Best

From Kosame