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Science and Movie Productions (Week 4)

I have to admit right from the start that this was an eventful week. Monday through Wednesday consisted of the usual process of analyzing observation data from Cunningham Slough and comparing it to model data generated from Forecast-26. This week, however, the analysis process took a new turn. This week I used a script provided by Grant to generate virtual .mov files of temperature and elevation data. Could this be the production break I have always wanted? Just Kidding!!! They turned out really cool. The each only last about 6 seconds but I was able to find a potential error in the temperature file, that possibly hints towards the wetting and drying errors that I discussed last week. It appears that there are large quantities of water re-appearing when the tide begins to rise again, but this water is really cold. This would support the idea of the wetting and drying, where again, when all nodes of the grid prisms become wet, they re-appear at their initial set up phase (January). Two of these videos can be found at the following links: Elevation Data (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxSpj6JfzdU&feature=youtu.be) and the Temperature data athttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSih31fNUIs&feature=youtu.be), hope you enjoy. 

I also worked this week on beginning to develop a different mean of model extraction. Grant and I have been finding some errors with in our modext methods. But this week’s high light took a turn on Thursday and Friday. It was the site visit on Thursday and I did not get any sleep the night before. I was just very excited when I found out that one of the team individuals was Dr. Cindy Van Dover, a Duke Professor at the Marine Lab. All of us interns sat in the "Big Window" room in the Cooley Science building while all of the professors and scientists sat in the library auditorium with the site team. We were watching the visit off of a TV screen. After about an hour Sasha and I decided to sneak into the auditorium and find a seat with Vanessa. I was really glad that I made that decision because I felt as if I was able to take more in by actually being in the same room. I was introduced to Roy Sampsel, who is one of the co-founders of CRITFC. He was such an inspiring individual, and his talk during the site visit was outstanding. 

During our lunch break I was able to eat and talk with Dr. Van Dover. She was amazing and so fund to listen to. It turns out she is actually going to be one of my professors next semester. I asked her to tell me her story, and I guess we could have spent all day talking. She was the first women pilot in an underwater submersible and she even wrote a book on it. She also told me about her research experiences down by Venezuela, where she currently cannot gain access to her sensors because of boundary issues. Overall the week was very tiring, and even more inspiring. I cannot wait for next week; I believe I will finally have access to my model run to begin extracting and coming up with solutions.