Blogs

Undergraduate Mindy Ingebretson and Doug Beck demonstrating an Immersion SuitWe spent a beautiful day on July 9 loading the ship and going out to lunch and dinner in Newport.

Its amazing that I'm already almost halfway done with my summer here. Whether I'm almost halfday done with my project is an entirely different question. One realization I've come across is that many of my problems result from lack of technique and background! Something that might take me two hours would take someone with more experience and skill mere minutes! So rather than judge my progress during this summer based on valuable data produced, it'd be more fair to judge it based on the experience/knowledge I've gained and the improvement of methods. It's all about the method development.

This week was rather frustrating. I believe computers are really great as long as they work. Unfortunately, this week it was not working as I had wanted. Grant and I couldn't get the Selfe program to compile. We made some progress but it didn't get the thing working.

But on a positive note, I enjoyed the graph presentations. I thought it was a great way to learn a bit more about other people's projects. It was also beneficial to get some input about our slides. It made me think of a few things I should have added to my slide just by looking at other people's.

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.

SATURN-01

Tides

Last week was the fourth of July weekend, so we had Friday off and I went to a barbecue at Chantel's family's house where they made amazing food. I also went to the blues festival in Portland on Thursday and Saturday, which was a lot of fun.

Most of this week was spent mainly in going through Grant's code from his two-dimensional IBM to get a feel for how I should start constructing mine. Also, in the beginning of the week, I spent some time preparing my mid-summer presentation.

Continuous Time Series (Salinity, Discharge, Winds)

Salinity vs Time

Last week was pretty busy preparing for the cruise especially since it was a short week. I finalized my sample sites and worked with Joe to make a cotton holding device to collect whitening agents at the end of our pump. Cotton absorbs the whitening agents and we are hoping to concentrate them in this device. On weds we had presented data to the other interns. I was able to get some good data from the spectrofluorometer using different detergents for this.