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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.

I leaned a lot about the mixing that takes place near the salt wedge in the estuary. There is a sharper gradient lower closer to the wedge and a weaker gradient closer to the river water. It is much easier for the lower salinity, less dense water to mix upwards than it is for the higher salinity, higher density water.

I also wrote a guide to filtering data. It is about two pages long, only because it has pictures, and describes two different methods.

Estuary Salinity

This is a picture of the Columbia river Estuary and its salinity. I included it because much of what I was doing this week depended on the intrusion of ocean water into the estuary.