First Week in Washington DC

June 8th, 2012

The IRIS internship started out with a wonderful orientation week in Socorro, New Mexico. It was great to meet all of the other interns, do a little bit of field work, and have lectures ranging from grad school to inverse theory. I never expected that I would be able to meet so many great people and learn so much about seismology in such a short period of time. I can't wait to see the results of all of my fellow interns work in December at AGU! 

After orientation week, I arrived in Washington DC to begin working on my project. On Monday, I walked past my new neighbor at the the White House on my way to IRIS headquarters! The first few days I spent getting to know my environment and learning more about my project. I was able to meet both my hosts and get lunch from a food truck (which is apparently quite popular in Washington DC). I also visited the Natural History Museum which has a small section on seismology.  Along with much help from my hosts and papers I have been reading I have been able to gain a better understanding of the methods I will be using to calculate receiver functions this summer. 

Later in the week I requested data for some IU stations through the IRIS data management center. I have been using some UNIX programming to organize my data and using a SAC program to go through the data to do some 'quality control' , removing noisy data. I plan to use this data in a matlab program that will help me understand receiver function graphs in both the time and frequency domain.

A few goals I have for this summer would include the following:

I would like to learn how to use software to create graphs and visual representations of my research as well as produce a well written abstract to submit to AGU. I hope to also read at least one paper every week that has to do with my research or any interesting research being done in seismology to increase my appreciation for seismology. I hope to become comfortable with both water level and iterative deconvolution and be able to discuss it in an academic environment. I would also like to try and visit all of the Smithsonian museums and become comfortable using the metro. 

Next week I will hop on the metro and head over to the University of Maryland to work with my other host and hopefully gain some more insight into receiver functions as I look at more and more data.