Damn it! While posting one day in advance I was hoping to be the first one to post (for once!). But no, Audrey is faster than me .
So I decided to post today because tomorrow Sam and I will spend our day inspiring young women to become scientist (aka boogie boarding).
I was off on Monday since I had to drive me family to SF.
Now, my family is gone (sad) but I am back at the housing with the other interns (glad).
On Tuesday I gave my talk and now I have a meeting planed with educators and tech people at the aquarium (which I am really glad for!! That is exactly why I wanted to present at MBARI!). Thanks to all the interns who attended my talk, nice support guys!
And then today I am finishing the side tasks in order to keep as much time as possible to focus on my presentation and report. I am ready with the structure of my talk and my report. I "just" need to write the report and create the presentation
Feeling quite nostalgic as I wrap up my project...

All for this week... and next week will be the very last confluence :/

G

This week has been better than the last two for my project, though I am definitely feeling like I am not where I want to be in terms of progress.  The good news is that I have data from Sam's LISST-HOLO analysis, and by all indications we should be able to tell something from the comparison of that data set with the LISST-100X data.  Right now it's just 24/7 Matlab work.  I am frustrated about my skills in Matlab.  I realized this week that working with Matlab is still something of an emotional rollercoaster - at one minute I make a breakthrough in understanding and presenting data effectively, and that rocks, and the next I feel like I know basically nothing about the programming language.  I had hoped to be more comfortable using Matlab at this point in the project, but from everything I've read and experienced with it, it just takes patience and practice to really master all the syntax and shortcuts.  I have been making a lot of progress while working with Dorota, and big thanks to Dongsik for his guidance in the program.

 Time to get back to work and knock this project outta the park.

P.S. Can I just take a minute to appreciate Geraldine's intro?  Could that be the theme of the week?

I was putting off starting formal preparations for my presentation until this week because I didn't want to think about wrapping things up, but it had to happen at some point. I'm please to report, though, that it hasn't been too bad so far. I've been doing a lot of spectral analysis of all the data I collected with the laser Raman and, as I go, I've been pulling out pieces that will be useful/interesting to explain in my talk. I've also made plots for a lot of the data that I had analyzed earlier (TOTALLY agree with you on the Matlabbing, Diane...), so I feel like things are coming along nicely. I met with my mentors about what I am going to focus on and how I'm going to present the information, but I'll still feel better once I've put a bit more of it together and there's a cohesive storyline. We've also discussed running one or two more experiments... not sure when that would be happening, but it's a possibility...

 Glad to have Geraldine back with us, but I'm missing having Evelyn and Francisco around the suite. And packing to head to the new place needs to happen tonight, I suppose! (Where does the time go?!)

 Ok, off to Land Use now, then back to work!

better late than never...

This week was another busy one. Most of my time was spent outside the office, again. I finished the fill in plate hole-drilling and installation on Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday I spend making some other submerged plate modifications (grinding off the anchor mount and sanding it down) and, since the last on broke during deployment, made a new bridal out of spectra rope to be used during the testing in the Test Tank. In order to create the new bridal I had to learn something new, a rope eye splicing technique where the rope is fed into its own core and tightens on itself if as tension is applied. The tricky part was making all four legs of the bridal the exact same length, to ensure that the plate doesn't swing or turn when lifted. Then I did a tension test on each bridal leg individually, to ensure they wouldn't snap during testing. Tension testing caused the ropes to stretch, which changed their lengths and required splice reworking to rematch all the lengths. When that was finally completed, the submerged plate and testing equipment was moved to the test tank. Today I worked on setting up the testing rig. Everything was ready to go by lunch, until the string potentiometer (device used to measure hydraulic ram position) broke! The rest of the day was spent taking it apart, putting it back together, realizing it was permanently broken, and then disassembling the PTO and retrieving the stringpot inside to replace the broken one. We should be running the tests tomorrow so if you guys wanna pop in and take a look, maybe take some pictures (Michael), come check it out!

Didn't make much forward progress this week. COAMPS wind is still a bear to work with, but I'm focusing down to the final steps. Midweek I realized I was averaging the wind vectors incorrectly and basically had to start all the way over. Now I'm on the second of five steps in the conversion process, but the next few steps should go rather quickly. Hopefully I'll be creating geotiffs of 3-day wind composites by the end of the day. Its just been very frustrating. But I'm determined to get it done!!

 I met with Leslie to discuss analyses for all these layers I am making. We narrowed down to three: 1) Use a prepackaged analysis in the MGET toolbox to find strong sea surface temperature gradients (fronts), which could select out upwelling regions; 2) rotate the vector components of current to determine cross-shore and along-shore water movement 3) use zonal statistics to monitor SST, chlorophyll, current, and wind (if i complete wind) within MPAs over time. It seems daunting, but hard fast work is what I love.

Geraldine, I loved your funny post! Glad to hear you are almost done and ready to write your paper and presentation. Hopefully, it'll be "just" as easy as making a tomato salad.

Peter, I forgot my camera today, but I'll stop by the test tank before noon and see if anything is still going on.

I think my project is wrapping up. This week I made some interdata comparisons between the wave glider, Dorado AUV, Fulmar underway and CTD casts, and the M1 mooring. Plotting the temperature and salinity data from these different platforms revealed that they produced comparable results and observed the same water masses and mixing regimes. The more interesting question, however, is whether the pCO2 data across platforms are comparable. I found that the wave glider and M1 pCO2 had excellent correlation (with a slope near 1 and an intercept near 0). Wave glider and underway pCO2 values (at the same time and position) didn't compare very well, but when all measurements were plotted versus temperature or salinity, they lied on the same line. It seems then that the wave glider pCO2 measurements do give reliable results.

 The last part of my project is to model what happens to the CO2 system during the relaxation of upwelling. The wave glider observed very high pCO2 values (>1000 ppm) and also very high CO2 fluxes (short-lived). Over the course of two weeks, the high pCO2 values eventually dropped back down to atmospheric levels (~400 ppm). The question is whether surface CO2 flux (gas exchange) or biological uptake was more important in bringing down the CO2 levels.

I played around with a CO2 drawdown model that is based on biological uptake, surface CO2 flux, carbonate precipitation, and nutrient-carbon relationships (from Redfield ratios). I haven't found the right conditions that match closely with observations so far. I tried a scenario where there was no biology and just pure gas exchange. The initial decrease of pCO2 was too fast, and then it leveled off so that the final pCO2 was still much higher than observed. (Putting the biology in causes too much of a decrease.) I will talk with my mentors to see if they have any ideas.

Ufff,I can believe that the internship is ending. My project is almost done, and now I can download the in situ measuremente in STOQS in Matlab. On thursday my mentor allow me to shear his project update, thanks Mike, and make a first presentation of my internship project and how to use the tool developed during it. Thanks to everyone for coming. I hope to have some feedback from the people who come, specially John Ryan, Monique Messi and Brian Schlining and then incorporate it to my project.
The next week I will focus in write my project. That's a very dificult task for me, cause write it in English is going to be hard.
Enjoy a lot the new housing and have a very nice weekend.

Guess this is my second last confluence. It feels like it's almost time to wrap up the internship project, but wait... Didn't I just start my project? Anyways, Confluence. My sea surface currents prediction based on a historic HF radar dataset did not work well for the GA coast data. My mentor and I generated some plots and movies to analyze what was wrong or what went wrong from where. We couldn't really figure out why, so we asked for some help from my research project advisor who visited MBARI last Monday and gave a talk about my last field experiment in Long Bay, SC. She is a physical oceanographer, and my mentor thought we might be able to get some input from her to resolve the issue we were having. Magically, she found that one of the EOF coefficients picked up wrong tidal frequency for some period of data. Then, I actually found that the tidal frequency of my HF radar data got corrupted for that specific period. I'll ask my mentor to confirm this, and will fix it and rerun the simulations. Hopefully, everything runs okay this time.

I had a long meeting with my mentors and my advisor last Monday to discuss what I have done and how we will develop this internship project towards some part of my Ph.D. thesis. I think we came up with a nice idea, and you'll hear about this on my presentation (hopefully...).

Hello everyone!
Sorry to be so late!

Week 8? No way! It can't be true!

This week was unusual for me, as I refrained from participating in any of the outreach activities, and did very little else aside from working on my summer project. I needed to seriously turn inward even more intensely than I had expected for Week 8. This is due to the fact that I found out that a portion of my work is being incorporated into an abstract that the Clague lab is presenting at the upcoming American Geophysical Union (AGU) Conference. The deadline for the abstract is the 8th of August, so this pushed my deadline in a wonderful direction that was different than I expected. I am now working very closely with Julie Martin, who is writing this particular abstract and running calculations for magma viscosity based on the crystal fractions I have been collecting from my project's microscope work. It should also be noted that everyone in my mentor's lab is writing at least one abstract for this upcoming conference, and the mood in the lab has been very exciting!

Despite the push and forward progress; however, I confess that I am going to have a difficult time completing all of my work on time. For reasons that would be too time-consuming to describe, I had to change one of my methods last week, and sort of do a bit of work over again. I also have a huge amount of mapping to do with GIS before my project can be considered complete...I will definitely be here late and on weekends, if anyone wants to share a vat of coffee!

I did have the pleasure of attending Geraldine's seminar on Tuesday. It was so great to hear about what she is doing in Sweden! Awesome work, Geraldine! Thank you for sharing with us!

So, I missed participating in the various outreach activities this week, and really enjoyed the ones for which I have participated. I look forward to the NASA-Ames visitors next week...and it will be good to practice speaking in front of people in the Pacific Forum! Yikes!

Good luck with all of your work during Week 9, everyone!

-Patti

I know, really late confluence.... oops!

Last week was pretty productive! Got most of my testing done and all three of them (Jason, Diane, and Brandon) zipped through the data that needed to be analyzed. Was really surprised! So the end of the week was mostly just organizing that.
Young Women in Science was a lot of fun on Thursday and the girls were pretty amazing. Plus we had burritos for lunch (which was a treat) and they were delicious! Only bad thing about that day was that I found out I won't be going on the Western Flyer for the next week :/ There's a leak so it needs to get repaired... no squid and jellies for me Steve was talking about still doing some blue water dives though so I may be joining him on those... not sure... we will see what we see.

Might as well fill you in on the weekend:
The weekend was good! Had a blast with my friend John visiting from New York. Good break from working so much.... And the night at the aquarium was GREAT! Loved the behind the scenes!!!

This week will be work work work! I have to rn some tests on AVED and finish my presentation and paper. May have an additional test subject as well

The meeting at NPS went well. We looked at the measurement equipment they have available. Due to the limited time available on both ends we will be running a set of steady state flow visualization tests. This involves making a scaled model 9in in wingspan and embedding 0.06 in diameter tubes to inject dye into the flow. The tunnel we will be using is a low speed water tunnel capable of producing Re numbers need for the scale of our model. Since the curves of the model are relatively complex the model is going to be sent to an outside company to be FDM rapid prototyped in ABS plastic. If all goes well we will be ready to test by Friday. Currently I'm still finishing up the model to send to protocafe (the rapid prototyping company).

Mostly just continued work on writing functions to deal with over-current, over-voltage, and under-voltage conditions on the LVLS board. Figured out the logic of the existing circuits and verified that the hardware was performing as expected. I still get some funny read-outs from the current sensing circuits.... either something is up with the hardware, or the ADC is acting up. I plan on figuring this out later today when Chad stops by. Overall, it wasn't the most productive week, since I have been sick (missed work wednesday) and had moving on Friday.

Oops, looks like I'm really late this time. Well, my project is wrapping up - I finished the Google Maps page and formatted it and linked it all up properly, so this week I'll be working on my presentation. Taking screen recordings takes a long time and a lot of patience, as I found out last year, because you have to do everything correctly all the way through and figure out how long something takes to load so you can plan what to say during that portion. And of course there's the paper to work on. Writing a paper about the DSG is hard because it's so different from a scientific paper - the whole thing is results and there are no physical materials or methods, just a laptop and typing. But it's not going to write itself, so I will press onward!