espiem's blog
The End
After 8 weeks, I am done working at CMOP. I can hardly believe how much I have learned. It seems crazy that just a few months ago, I didn't know what an ETM was, or a salt wedge, or anything about estuaries for that matter. Now, I like to think that I know how they work and why they are important. My learning was not limited to estuaries. Working here taught me valubal presentation and computer skills.
Week 6: July 28- August 1
Nirzwan gave Khalilha and I diagrams (scanned onto the computer) of the eustuary and sediment distribution. He instructed us to make the differences more apparent by adding color.
After finishing the maps, we were told to answer the following questions:
How many different types of sediments were found?
Seasonal Differences? Which seasons?
What does the generalized sediment distribution map show?
Overlay the north and south channels.
What sorts of sediments do you see in the north channel?
What sorts of sediments do you see in the south channel?
Week 4: July 13-18
Monday: Grant gave me three things to do:
1) Predict the time difference between the maximum change in salinity and maximum turbidity during each change in tide
2) Find the correlation between tidal range and the magnitude of turbidity
3) Do all analyses with regard to all classes of turbididty spikes
I made progress with the first goal. I got some results, but will need to revise and improve them. I made a small amount of progress on the second goal, although not enough to make any conclusions.
Week 3: July 7-10
Monday: I gave a presentation that I had worked on last week. It was about turbidity and salinity in the estuary and their patterns. After the presentation, I recieved some reading from Nirzwan about ETMs. Using that paper and some of the data I have, I am supposed to gather some ideas for finding the ETM and suggestions for where to collect water samples. After some brainstorming, I decided that it would be possible to use information about the tides to predict where probable locations would be, as regions of high turbidity are typically found just upstream of the salt wedge.
Week 2: June 30-July 3
Well, after being absent for a week, it is great to be back. This week I spent most of my time analyzing some more data from SATURN 01. I did a lot of work with salinity, turbidity, and tides.
We noticed many patterns with turbidity and salinity. When salinity is high, turbidity is low. Likewise, when turbidity is high, salinity is low. Also, there are spikes in turbidity that correlate with the change in tide.
Week 1: June 16-20
I’m a senior at Aloha High School. I am involved in several school clubs and activities. I am a part of the Earth Club (president), Science Research Club, Marching Band (section leader), political debate club (president), National Honor Society, and the leadership program (sr class vice president).
This week, I have spent much of my time on the computer. I have greatly expanded my skill with Microsoft Excel and Matlab. We have been downloading data from the CMOP website and analyzing it with these programs. We have used them to graph data and find correlations.