Week One

June 18th, 2010

So far things are going pretty well.  I previously told you about what we did Monday, but I did not tell you the frustrating fact that the seismometers we removed where in perfect position to catch the earthquake that occurred during my last blog.  Sadly, we removed them just a few hours too early.  Tuesday began the real work on our project.  I was shown to a small office with three desks in it.  There are two other undergrad interns that work in here with me, though we all have different things we're working on.  My first task was to search through all Northern and Southern California seismic stations in a certain latitude/longitude range to see if they had continuous data during the week we are focusing on.  I plotted the stations in google earth and downloaded the data from each station.  After downloading the data, I compiled that with the information from the stations Elizabeth set up before I arrived.  My next task was to look through the data using sac for catalogued earthquakes that occurred close to the stations during that week.  If I found one of the earthquakes, I then created a postscript file of the seismograms showing that earthquake.  This turned out to be a much longer task than anticipated because the server crashed, and I was unable to work on it for a large chunk of the day yesterday.  Instead, Elizabeth gave me papers to read which outlined a similar way to how we are going to analyze our data for tremor.  Today I finished looking for the catalogued earthquakes and am starting to analyze the data for tremor.  As far as my goals go, Unix and I are starting to get along better.  I haven't really used Matlab yet, but will hopefully be starting to today when the server comes back up after being temporarily shut down to be fixed.  I am still very homesick, but am hoping that as time passes this gets better.

Oh, and on a completely different note, my new bike (which I bought less than a week ago) has a flat tire, which I discovered after I was done working.  This meant I had to walk the whole way back, pushing my bike.  In a strange way, the whole situation just made me laugh.  I wasn't laughing this morning, however, when I then had to walk 20ish minutes to get to work.  Hopefully I can get it fixed soon.