I met with Jessica about my thesis this morning and am processing the conversation with this post. We mainly talked about how to situate and frame more clearly. I think all the pieces of my thesis are there and will largely remain the same, but it comes down to asking and wording the right questions so that the framing background logically leads into my situated context. The other difficulty is making sure that the questions I ask may be answered with an interdisciplinary methodology.
One of the things I realized talking to Jessica, was that in many cases I am interested in how knowledge is constructed, and an epistemological to meteorology and climatology. Clouds most often occupy space within the intersection of meteorology and climatology because atmospheric data often informs both climate models and weather forecasts and historical weather observations make up a climatic record. There is a rough timeline of these difference sciences where first came the study of weather and meteors, then we became more interested the the process of weather, so more atmospheric science, then we started focusing on climate science, and specifically climate change.
If my situated context looks at sources of knowledge in cloud research then I could still use use all the resources I have gathered but also be interdisciplinary about my methodology. So in the never ending question to actually word the questions I want to ask…
Framing question: How is knowledge constructed in meteorology and climate science?
Focus question: Where does our understanding of clouds come from and how accurate are our ways of measuring clouds?
Alrighty then, I think it is time to rewrite an outline!