Finally to work

June 15th, 2010

Finals in San Diego are finished, and every personal belonging moved to the north. I reported for my first day yesterday at the USGS here in Menlo Park (right close to the Stanford Campus), and met the crew there. Darcy was very warm and welcoming, as was everyone I met. Looks like there's alot of different aspects to this whole project, so while Simon Klemperer is still my go-to advisor, I'll be going-to lots of other people thoughout the summer. The E&M half of things is rather underdeveloped as compared the huge world of seismology, but that just means I get to learn about litteraly EVERY step of the way from collection to processing from the very same people who developed it.

The project, to describe as simply as I can, is to compare E&M data collected by the magnetic coils and electrode pairs that we maintain to the seismic broadband station immediately adjacent (technically maintained by the Berkeley guys). The project tech, Aaron, showed me two of the sites yesterday, one right by Stanford and another close to Berkeley (have you ever been out to the BRIB station Rob?).  So, in addition to whatever research aspect I choose to pursue, a couple days a week I'll be helping Aaron and the other undergad on the project out in the field fixing, improving, testing, etc. etc. A student at Berkeley just custom designed his own Analog to Digital converter specifically for our purposes -- no small task, and now it'll be a team effort to install and test the component (which is actually the main focus of my undergrad counterpart on the project, Henry). Turns out tech Aaron was a UCSD physics undergrad back in the day (exactly the same as myself), so we'll have plenty to talk about every time we get stuck in Bay Area traffic like we did yesterday. He'll be teaching me alot of about the electronics, and seeing as how he had the same professor for the same electronics class I just finished a week ago, he has a pretty good idea where my background is.

Right now I'm working with Unix and matlab... there's a program freshly written to help download the data off the Berkeley server that should be pretty straightforward and user-friendly, once its installed and running properly. But therein lies the trouble, or fun, depending on how you see it.

Goals for the summer:

First third: Learn everything I can about everything. This is not realistic in itself, but the mentality I'm taking on... Specifically:

-Matlab and Unix (something that will come out of necessity as I go rather than through tutorials)

-History of the project -- want to be able to clearly define its purpose, methods, and goals in my own words.

-How the equipment works. I'm very interested in how the seismographs and E&M stations actually measure a property of the earth and get it to a table of values that we can make graphs with. This is an approach I think every scientist who works with data should undestand. Maybe I won't ever use need to design my own digitizer, or ever have to rely on the basics of signal processing, but this is my opportunity to learn how it works nonetheless.

-Choose a more focused contribution I can bring to the table. I've been given a few options as to what I might hunker down with, one being a more computer focused analysis of data and another to designing my own coil w/ power source to help calibrate and test the equipment. I need to explore these different tracks and talk to the researchers more to understand what they all mean.

Second third:

- Get to work. Make something. More focused project details to come (as soon as I know them, believe me!)

- Continue to help in the field with the maintenance of these sites and the field testing of the new digitizer.

- Regardless of which project I choose, I'll be pouring over the collected data both for my own practice with computers and for my own curiosity!

Final third:

- Finish up the project, start forming it all into a poster that I bring to AGU. I've gotta represent this project as whole and the team working on it, so I'll be hard pressed to do well.

Cheers, Daniel