Memphis Goals!

June 5th, 2010

I'm in Memphis! Right now the number one thing I'm looking forward to is sleeping in a room that isn't freezing, but Monday the real fun begins!

I'm starting off this internship by sailing down the Mississippi for several weeks. During the trip we'll be imaging the layers underneath the New Madrid Seismic Zone(NMZS) using an airgun as our source. We are also going to be taking CHIRPP data. During the voyage I'll be helping with the data acquisition, doing some quality control testing, and taking a preliminary look at the data as it comes in.

When we return to Memphis after our 300 km trip I'll be responsible for taking a look at a short length of the river. This is going to include doing different tests on it to find the best parameters for analysis as well as using ProMAX extensively. By the end of the internship I should know this profile inside out.

So goals for the summer:

First three weeks:
Learn all about acquiring data out on the boat. Dr. Magnani's talk about her research has given me a pretty good picture of what its going to be like out there but I am still very curious about every step and how its going to go each day. I saw the Mississippi when we flew it and that is a seriously big river! I can not wait to be out there on it!
Start talking to the grad students about their projects and what grad school is like.

Second three weeks:
Become really comfortable with Promax and any other softwares we're going to use to analyze the data.
Be able to look at a profile and recognize where there is noise and/or multiples and what is the actual signal.

Third three weeks:
Continue the analysis, I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to be looking for in my length of the river but based on what we did in the Promax class I'm guessing there will be lots of filtering and who knows maybe I'll be the lucky duck to find another fault.
Write an abstract for AGU before going back. Best to do these things while everything is still in my mind plus the first couple of weeks of school tend to be busy enough on their own.

More generally I'm really looking forward to this summer as an opportunity to get a good idea of what grad school is like, what being a geophysicist is like, which I like better: field work and the gathering of data or the analysis that takes place in the lab, and hopefully a more focused image of what I want to do after earning my physics degree.