Looking Back at My Fall Internship

By Andrew Sullivan

Hello, my name is Andrew Sullivan and it’s an honor to talk to you all again; if you ever visited the summit and bumped into me you’ll know I just LOVE talking. Pretty wild that three months have already gone by and I’m now I’m recapping my fall internship experience. This has probably been the most enjoyable work experience of my life. Not only did I get to experience wind speeds of up to 120 mph (more on that later), but I got to develop my forecasting skills and work with some great people. It was great to reconnect and work with my friend from Plymouth State, Charlie (even though he wasn’t there my first week) and it was a pleasure to get to know Alex and Alexis. All three helped improve my forecasting skills significantly, getting better at typing forecast discussions and even the occasional Facebook live broadcast. Corbin, the Museum Attendant, was here for the majority of my internship and working with him in the Extreme Mount Washington Museum was always a blast, I’ll never look at a nickel the same.

Charlie and I doing some work on Vane B.

Life on the summit isn’t always easy, especially when the view is only fog for a week straight just to find out you’re getting stuck an extra day. But I got to do a TON of hiking around the White Mountains, going to Tuckerman’s Ravine, Mt. Monroe, and Mt. Clay. Sadly I didn’t quite make it to Jefferson, so I’ll come back another time and do that. A major highlight was getting some sledding in when the summit got 9 inches of snow overnight! De-icing the equipment every hour was a task I did as much as possible, it always got my blood pumping standing in the instrument ring with winds at 70 mph and dodging the occasional chunk of ice. Even a task as simple as shoveling snow was more exciting at the summit, and I’m also one to never pass up a good workout!

Myself holding a beautiful racing line while sledding during some free time.

Over the course of my internship I was working on a research project looking at the correlation between icing at the summit and pilot reports of nearby icing. Over the course of this project I learned more about Excel, giving my data analysis skills a massive boost. The code for the project was my largest hurdle, and I learned so much about Python and how to code. The results from my project calculated a weak correlation of 0.37, which makes sense considering the clouds that cause icing at the summit are usually orographic and contained to the mountains.

After a long period outside doing instrument maintenance, I was the best spot for some rime ice to form. This was actually pretty cool. Get it… cool :).

This internship has been one of the most enjoyable work experiences ever; I learned so much to help advance my career in meteorology. Going forward, I am currently  submitting job applications and I know my experience here at the Observatory will help land my next job. As an avid Formula 1 fan, I can sum up this internship in two words: “Simply Lovely”- Max Verstappen.