ATM M.S. News
Atmospheric Sciences Grad Students Have Exciting Summer
This past summer, Sarah Nelson, Volga, SD, had the opportunity to work for the USDA Forest Service Northern Hills Ranger District in Spearfish, South Dakota , as a Fuels Technician/Wildland Firefighter. Sarah's duties included gathering fuel moisture samples, completing fuel plots for a potential prescribed burn, fighting wildland fires, and other duties as assigned. She was also given the opportunity to complete research related to her thesis work, which involved weekly collections of Ponderosa pine needles from five sites in the Northern Black Hills . During the Fall 2006 semester, Sarah's research will focus on the comparison of her field measurements with those obtained by the MODIS satellite.
James Hulka, Metuchen , NJ, worked at the Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt , MD , from June 5 to August 11, 2006. During his ten weeks at Goddard, he worked on satellite image processing from MODIS surface radiance data products and created data plots of various geophysical parameters during hurricanes (cloud top height, UV Reflectance, Column Ozone, etc) from different instruments (MODIS, MLS, TOMS, OMI, and TRMM). His specific task was to create these many images and plots for each Atlantic Hurricane from 2002 to 2005 (35 total) over the course of its meteorological lifetime as a hurricane. These data productions are now shown in the Image Archive Gallery of the GES DISC Hurricane Portal website, now available to the public (http://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/hurricane/gallery.shtml). In all James created approximately 230 true color images from over 60GB of satellite data using IDL/ENVI, and 460 data plot animations. While at Tech, James is doing research work on the C-Lock carbon sequestration project, under the direction of Dr. Pat Zimmerman.
