Recent Posts by the IRIS Interns http://www.iris.edu/internship/blogs 2011-10-29T12:32:47-05:00 IRIS Internship http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/final_post1

Hi! So it's been a long while since I posted.  My last two weeks at NSTech were really hectic.  Since I had finally gotten SPW and had to redo all of my picks once I got some help from Rob Abbott, my goal was initially to try and make a model from scratch before leaving. But then I got an opportunity to do more field work, so Cathy advised me to put off the model and go out into the desert to get some useful experience. So for week 8 I got to calibrate refteks and spend some quality time at BEEF (Big Explosive Experiment Facility).  I tried to stay to watch them explode a U-Haul, but it ended  up taking too long and we had to leave before they did it. (I did get to watch some nice videos of it afterwards though).  Back at the office I started inputing some shot location data from field notesw into my model and figured out how to work around a glitch in MacRay. In week 9 I went back to the test site 3 more times to install new trillium seismometers.  These are really sensitve and had to be perfectly level.  They were also placed at farther distances from the test bed than the geophones and refteks I had been working with before, which means I got to go on the scenic route of the test site and do some quality hiking.  I thought it was fun, although I did feel bad for Ryan, who had to do all the driving.  There were a lot of craters, rocks, fences, and old radioactive equipment to dodge and weave through.  Plus he was the one who had to lift open the covers on the trilliums, which had a tendency to have animals living in them (mice, lizards, and 2 blackwidow spiders).  In addition to the inhabitants of our sensors, I also saw some wild horses and a coyote!  And back at the office, I first made a model to fit the picks that I had. But then I found out I had to redo all of my picks, so I just barely had time for that before I saved everything to an external to take home with me.  Plus that weekend there was a hurricane back home, so I had some trouble rushing to get the last flight I could that was still going to Boston, but I made it home in time to visit my aunt's beach house for a great view of the giant waves and intense wind! Anyways, so I am still in the process of finishing my model back in RI.  It has taken me a while to get restarted, since I have been busy with my senoir thesis, but hopefully I can get a good model that makes sense before AGU.  Looking back at my goals, I am really glad I got to do some field work, and I had a lot of fun doing it.  I also am glad I had to carpool with my advisor, because it helped me get to know her a little better, since we usually weren't in the same building during the day.  Because of my hand injury, I had a lot of time to read seismology books, so I think I have learned a good deal about seismology.  I also had a good time in Las Vegas--I think my favorite place was visiting the Belagio because everything was beautiful and magical looking, like some sort of candy land or something.  I also got to try out a few computer programs: JRG, SPW, Macray, and I played around with unix and matlab.  I am still working on analyzing my data, but I'm optimistic about it.  Looking back at my blog, I definitely had some frustrating times, but in the end I did get a lot of experience, and got to learn about seismology from a lot of different perspectives- from doing fieldwork to reading papers to learning new software to sitting in on research planning meetings to figuring out how to work with bureaucracy.  As for my future, I'm still undecided.  I now know I want to go to grad school in geophysics, maybe even for seismology, or maybe focussing more on earthquake mechanics.  I am really excited to go to AGU this fall and am glad I have become a part of the geophysics ccommunity so that I can learn more about all the exciting research out there.    

2011-10-29T12:32:47-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/final_post

I'm now back at school and caught up on work from missing two weeks of class for the research cruise.  But I think it was worth it because I really enjoyed the cruise despite being sea sick.  We managed to recover 32 of the 34 OBSs and I was truly fascinated by the recovery process.  The OBS Techs on board the ship used a device to electronically send signals down to the particular instrument we were attempting to recover.  If communication was established, they would then send a different signal that would allow the instrument to release its anchor and begin rising to the surface.  We would calculate what time we believed it would arrive on the surface based on an average rise rate and have people in the bridge and on the deck looking for it.  Luckily, the instruments are big and yellow with a bright orange flag so they're pretty easy to spot even from a distance.  They also emit a radio signal when they get to the surface that shows up on the bridge's radar and they have a strobe light for recoveries in the dark.  Once they are on the surface, the ship must be navigated to their position and people with lines and a crane are used to pull it out of the water and onto the deck.  I helped out with this portion of the process a lot because I enjoyed the physical part of the recovery. Once the instruments were recovered, the data chips were removed and formatted, filtered, and viewed.  I luckily got to look at some of the data as well and got P-wave polarities that will hopefully be able to improve my focal mechanism calculations.  I plan on using this new data to re-run HASH for the local earthquakes that I calculated focal mechanisms for to see how it changes the results - if our theory is correct, this additional coverage should improve the results.  I'm just worried that the new data won't improve my calculations because the polarities were very difficult to pick for the small, local earthquakes so the data may be incorrect.  I guess I'll just have to wait until I find time to actually run the program and see what happens.  Either way, I will be discussing it on my poster for the AGU conference. I saw lots of dolphins while I was on the boat - especially since the signals used to communicate with the OBSs was at a frequency similar to the one that dolphins used and attracted them to the ship.  I also saw some seals, sea birds, and squids, but unfortunately no sharks or whales.  It was nice to sit on the deck and look for sea life when the weather was nice and the seas weren't too rough, especially since there wasn't too much else to do on the ship (besides tons of schoolwork!). The research cruise helped me decide that I do actually want to study physical oceanography in graduate school and am willing to go on another cruise.  Since I definitely know what I want to do know now, I just have to get through this semester, study and take the GRE (which I'm finally signed up to take in November), and apply to grad schools.  I'm very glad that I did this internship - it was a priceless experience and I learned a lot about myself as well as seismology.

2011-09-28T15:27:02-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/from_the_rv_new_horizon

Hello all!  Its been a while since the last time I blogged and so much has happened.  While I was home, I survived an earthquake and a hurricane - neither of which are common occurrences in New Jersey.  I also survived my first week of classes, which ended up only being two days long because of the hurricane.  I'm really excited about some of my classes this semester; they look really interesting and I like all of my professors.  I'm also continuing some independent research that I've been doing with my advisor at TCNJ and will be presenting that research at the AGU conference as well. But now I'm back in sunny California and aboard the R/V New Horizon in preparation for the research cruise that will conclude my IRIS internship.  The whole crew will spend the night on board the ship at the port and then we push off for open water at 8 AM tomorrow morning.  I've been assigned the 4-8 shift, which means that I will be at the main lab with two other student volunteers taking logs and helping with the OBS recovery from 4 AM to 8 AM and 4 PM to 8 PM.  These would be ungodly hours under normal circumstances, but since I am adjusted to East Coast time they actually work out pretty well for me.  I am, however, worried about sea sickness especially since this is a small ship (only 170').   I'll try to post a couple of blogs about our progress throughout the cruise, but the internet is not entirely reliable so I'll post when I can.  I also have some school work to get done while I'm on the ship since I will be missing two weeks of classes.  Between work and all of the television shows and movies on my hard drive I should have plenty of things to occupy me in my down-time.  I think this is going to be a really great experience to have before going to graduate school and I think its going to be a lot of fun as well!

2011-09-06T17:36:03-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/first_blog_of_the_summer

So the week of orientation is almost over, I have to catch a shuttle at 5:30 AM tomorrow. The week has been an amazing experience. New Mexico Tech is a beautiful school and although small they own their own golf course! The weather is nice and warm especially compared to Reno where it was starting to snow when I boarded my plane. I met the other interns from all across the country and they have all been really cool. I have learned that even in the US the cultures on the East and West coast are completely different. I will miss this week and talking to everyone and am looking forward to the blog posts to see how everyone is doing on their research. We hiked up to almost 11,000 feet; the view was amazing:      My favorite part was having all of these professors with clear schedules that I could ask questions to. I have learned a lot and got some awesome scripts for GMT and MATLAB and I feel pretty prepared going into this coming week. I am looking forward to starting my research on fault tremors in Ohio. I am still a little unsure about exactly what I will be doing for the summer but I do have a few goals:- I want to make some new friends and explore Ohio. - I want to make a good first impression with the knowledge base I have acquired over the past couple of years and apply that to my host’s research project. - I want to have an amazing poster to present at the AGU meeting in December. I mean I want it to catch a few professors from others schools so I can talk to them about their current research. - I want to stay in contact with some of the interns and the professors that I met this week at orientation. - My long-term goal is to get a new way of thinking about research and pick a graduate school based on my experience! Till next week!

2011-08-24T17:42:44-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/reflection_on_summer

So I am finally back in Reno after an amazing cross-country journey with my girlfriend. Now that I am back I am at full sprint to keep up with everything. There was emails to be sent, a job interview, papers to be signed and the hunt for a new apartment all before Monday when school starts. Let me first begin by reflecting on the summer of research. The research that I was doing was amazing, it was new stuff and we found some interesting correlations that I am saving for my poster at AGU. As an overall experience it ranks up there in the top things that I have done, I learned so much. I learned skills that I will continue to grow when I go to graduate school such as: • Reading and Understanding scientific papers      o This was really difficult for me at first but as time went on and I read and re-read them I started to understand how they are formatted. One      thing that I could still improve on is ranking the papers. Mike said that I should be able to rank the papers and why certain papers are better      than others. • Organizing massive amounts of data      o I knew shortly after I started that this was going to be a challenge. It really took some innovated thinking to keep all the data organized          and noted. I succeeded with this project by keeping a spreadsheet with personal notes and taking screenshots constantly. This allowed          me to get quick access to data I wanted to glance back at and then I could open the data in SAC for further inspections. • C-shell scripting      o I did so much scripting this summer. Although C-shell may not be the most efficient language it can be extremely useful. I was able to            take my though process and implement it into code. This is a useful skill to have and to maintain especially because it meshes so well              with GMT. • Making maps and graphs with GMT      o At the beginning of summer I had very basic knowledge of this program. As the summer continued I got really good with it. I found that it        makes graphs as well as maps and they all look good. This is a very useful skill to have because no that I recognize the format of GMT            maps I see them all over all kinds of posters and in papers! • Managing my time to get everything done in a timely manner      o This was one of my biggest concerns before I left for Oxford because my life was always scheduled. When I go to work I have to clock in      and out and I have to be there on time. This summer I had so much freedom about when and where to work. I really enjoyed this freedom        and I did figure out how to manage it. I found that if I go to the office my focus seems to be the best, but late at night before I go to bed I tend      to get a lot of work done as well. I also confirmed that I am NOT a morning person. Thos were the main skills that I had honed in on over the summer. I also learned a lot of information about my specific topic, triggered tremor. There are still many unanswered questions. This I found was something that came along with research. As I though I found a correlation there came more questions. It seemed like I would never reach the answer. I could have easily spent a year on this project. I left with many unanswered questions and possible solutions that would just take to much time to try to isolate. I will have a great poster at AGU though and will maintain my contact with Mike to finish it. I will be attending the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous to present my poster and interview with Noble Energy. I really did enjoy the summer and learned so much. I will keep in touch with everybody and I am looking forward to seeing everyone at AGU. Here is a quick GMT map I did to show my route back with a few pictures a long the way (illustrator): Thanks for this opportunity I will use the many skill to go to a graduate school and possible get my PhD or go into industry, that is something that I have not decided yet.   Peace out till AGU Brady Flinchum  

2011-08-24T17:38:01-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/reflections_on_an_amazing_summer

It is hard to put into words how amazing this internship experience was for me. I learned so much about myself, research, and seismology. Oregon was an amazing place to be for the summer. I made so many friends and had so many great experiences exploring the state. Looking back at my first post about my goals made me realize how many of those I accomplished. I think I hit on everyone this summer. At the beginning of the summer, I was so nervous about researching. I always looked forward to it, but I did not know what to expect. It was amazing how much what I learned in my classes could be applied to my research! It is a wonderful feeling when you know you learned something in class and now you can apply it to a real problem. I feel like I also learned a lot about myself and my brain capabilities over the summer. I know now that I enjoy researching and the challenges it brings. I love getting data and then thinking about it and working at it from different angles. I also learned that this process can be frustrating and tedious at times. I just have to stay motivated and keep working through the problem. I have to finish finding the locations of the earthquakes. My next little assignment is to create a travel time model for a grid of the earthquake estimated locations to the OBS locations. It should be an interesting MATLAB project to keep me busy in my free time. This internship made me realize that I definitely want to study geophysics and most likely focus on seismology. I think seismology is just so fascinating and I would love to study it more. Now I have to start looking into graduate schools! I hope everyone had a great summer and a successful school year!  

2011-08-24T10:53:01-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/last_post1

Friday was my last day at OSU. I got the velocity model done but I have a feeling I will still need to do more work on it, and I need to make my poster. The last week was crazy. Tuesday afternoon I was really getting somewhere with the velocity model when my project burned to the ground in front of me. No, I did not set my computer on fire, although that was tempting at the time. The numbers just weren't working out. I was extremely frustrated. But the next day my project rose from the ashes again when I realized that I'd typed in a number wrong, it was off by 1/100, and that had messed everything up. So I ended up getting a velocity model done but it is very simple. It doesn't have very many layers because we can only use certain events that are in line with the array to calculate true velocities. Reflecting on my time this summer I know that I learned a lot. Before orietation I didn't realize how little I knew about seismology. I still don't know a lot, but I know a lot more than I did. I think this will give me a leg up when I take geophysics this fall. Sometimes I got really frustrated because my research wasn't going anywhere or I didn't think I would get a result. I thought that I was doing a bad job and letting everyone down. But after talking to John, I realized that this is how research often goes. I really enjoyed the fieldwork, but the labwork was not as easy for me. It was hard to sit in front of the computer all day and pick or write fortran files. So will I persue seismology in the future? Who knows. I still have plenty of time to decide. Afterall I am only about to start my junior year. I like the final products of seismological research: plate motions, boundaries and images of the deep crust. However I found the process difficult and at times frustrating. So we'll see where the future takes me. For now I have one week till school starts. I'm taking a roadtrip to Montana to visit my friend who lives near Glacier. I hear there's some cool rocks there. My computer will be staying home. See you all at AGU.

2011-08-21T12:53:14-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/last_post

It has been a long summer, but I have learned a lot. I feel like I started out a little bit ahead of the game when we got to New Mexico since I had already taken two seismology classes and done 3 weeks of volcano seismology research, but I soon found out that I had tons more to learn. I had never worked with UNIX or GMT and they seemed really intimidating. Now I am at the end of summer and I have to say while there were some challenges I feel like the things I was afraid of in NM weren’t nearly as difficult or scary as I thought they would be. And now since I do know UNIX and GMT I’ve been help other student I know learn it too. I feel like I accomplished my goals for the most part. I am a little disappointed that I didn’t get to do any of the 3D tomography while I was there, but I still got some really good results that I am really happy with. And I will still probably get to see the tomography results even though I didn’t get to create them. Since I finished my internship way back in July I have had three more weeks of doing MORE seismology research with Greg Waite back at Michigan Tech where I go to school. I am studying a volcano called Pacaya which is located in Guatemala. Since I have gotten back I have produced a very shallow (~500m deep) velocity model. I’m thinking I will write a post final blog all about this for those of you who are interested. In all I have learned some great research tools this summer ranging from UNIX to independent problem solving (aka fixing problems when an advisor isn’t there to help). These tools will be really helpful once in grad school.  

2011-08-18T16:05:09-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/reflection1

Now that I have returned to Ithaca, I can take a moment to reflect on this summer. I loosely accomplished all the goals I had set forth at the start of summer-- I learned a lot about current research in seismology, how graduate school works, and more about conducting scientific research.  I may never have caught a banana slug but I got plenty of close encounters so even that goal feels fulfilled.   I still have much to do from here-- at the minimum I need to prepare my poster for the AGU conference, as well as perhaps continue analyzing data and working with Susan. I hope to finish work affiliated with this summer to the best that I can and to give a solid poster session at AGU.    This summer introduced many new concepts and ideas to me that rather than spending too much time thinking of past goals, too many new ones are forming.  I definitely feel inspired to continue in geophysics, and hopefully I will be able to pursue more seismology at Cornell.  I changed most of classes for this year around to give myself a stronger background in physics/math so that next summer I can gain experience in other geophysical research fields to narrow down my interests for graduate school-- this summer solidified my interests in pursuing graduate school immediately after undergrad.    Hopefully as I continue taking courses and getting involved in research my experiences from this summer will help me deal with future research setbacks/bumps and help give me the courage to continue to be inquisitive in the class and outside.  Otherwise, I'd better get ready for the onslaught of classes!

2011-08-17T13:44:43-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/final_post.so_sad

Wow. The pressure is on now. It wasn't long ago that I was arriving in New Mexico nervous and excited for a week of fun orientation activities revolving around my favorite topic: earthquakes. Orientation was an amazing week - a whirlwind of all things geophysics. We covered field work with two fun hikes, broadband station installation, and a reflection survey; and we covered lab work with common software tutorials and data analysis. This successfully prepared us all for our respective projects, which is kind of amazing since we all had varying topics of interest this summer. The only downside of the NMT orientation was that we finally met our fellow interns for a week, then we scattered all over the world and we don't get to see one another until AGU in December. However, it was pretty easy to keep in touch with the blog posts and facebook group. I am still really excited to see everyone again, though! My biggest fear going into my summer project was not being impressive enough to my host. I worked at Harvard University, so understandably, I was intimidated. Early on, my fears were extinguished because everyone was so welcoming and helpful. Over the course of the summer I ran into some unexpected issues with the data processing, which was not my fault, but it still made me feel like I wasn’t living up to the expectations bestowed upon me. In the end, I didn’t finish everything that was included in the project description, which my host admitted was incredibly ambitious, but we have plans to continue obtaining the results so that my AGU poster and presentation will included everything. I am really excited to see what else we can find! I really enjoyed my time at Harvard. It was an incredible experience and I learned a lot (which I was expecting, but the lessons covered broader topics than I thought). The entire IRIS Internship Program is flawless as far as I am concerned and I would recommend it to anyone pursuing geophysics. As far as future endeavors go, I have started contacting potential grad advisors – which is a ton of pressure! But it is another area that the IRIS internship helped me with because before orientation, I was planning on going for my Master’s after graduation, however, the career panel at the end exposed me to the idea of going straight to pursuing my PhD. And skipping the Master’s. I didn’t know that was really an option, but now it is my plan. Having the internship on my resume will be a huge advantage because it taught me a lot about how this field operates. Not to mention the word “Harvard” alone should peak some interest. Overall, this was a fantastic opportunity and I cannot express enough how many great things I got out of it. Also, for those of you who voted for me for best blogger award, I am glad you enjoyed reading my posts as much as I enjoyed writing them! I loved all yours too! See you in December! Can't wait!

2011-08-15T17:41:41-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/the_final_countdown2

The past few weeks have been pretty busy. Since the last time I blogged I have been making headway on my project. The week before last I turned in my AGU abstract. I'm excited to go to AGU and see everone's results. Hopefully when I leave this friday I'll have some results of my own to present. I finally have a good idea of what it is I've been working on this summer and what results I am looking for. I am making a velocity model for Pleasant Valley. My mentor and his grad students set up the array last fall, but I am the first person to look at the data. I am using refraction seismology techniques on passive source data. Passive Source data tends to complicate things. Normally for seismic refraction the event locations and origin times are known. For actuall earthquakes this isn't the case, so I have to locate earthquakes myself, or use ANSS locations if they are available. We also have to account for depth, because our sources don't occur at the surface. The linear geometry of the array also makes things difficult. To get travel times across the array I can only use events that occur in line with the array. For large events and regionally events I look in the ANSS database for events that occur in the right locations. But since there isn't good seismic network coverage in the area I need to locate small and local events myself. Sometimes this is a slow going process, but I have been making progress. This is my last  week here, so ideally I will get a lot done so I don't have to spend a lot of time working on my project during the school year.  I've also been making time to explore Oregon on the weekend. Unfortunately I wasn't able to climb South Sister. Since there was a lot of late spring snow this year, the trail isn't in great condition. I would have needed snowshoes and winter stuff to do the climb, plus hiking buddies who felt comfortable with snow travel. But I did do some other fun stuff. I went obsidian hunting with some oceanography interns,so now I have a sweet obsidian collection. Last weekend I hung out with the oceanography interns again. We drove down to Crescent City, CA to see the redwoods and go ocean fishing. One intern's dad has a boat and is really into fishing so he took us out on the ocean to fish. Prior to this I hadn't ever fished, unless you count a few sorry attempts at fly fishing last summer. So I wasn't sure if I would have a good time. Now I'm hooked (no pun inteded) on fishing. It was amazing! I caught at least 6 fish, and I'm really excited to eat them. I just need to find some good recipes for rockfish.

2011-08-15T14:11:54-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/field_work_and_home

Well, after a week of field work, I am now home and it feels good. Getting ready for school and am excited for the new semester to start, even though it will be ridiculously busy. Field work was great and I had no idea how beautiful Idaho was! (who woulda thought?) It was near the most physically demanding work I have done, and was a great way to burn all those calories that had built up over the long summer of sitting in the lab. We were deploying an array of broadband stations across the Idaho batholith, which made for ridiculously long and hard carries of equipment. I was lucky enough to get to carry 70lb batteries to every station we deployed on 100+ meter hikes laterally and anywhere from 20 to 100 meters vertically. Good leg workout! I feel pretty comfortable in deploying broadband stations now, and I thought it was definitely the most entertaining part of my internship. Don't get me wrong, I learned a TON from my research project and am very happy about the results, and I wouldn't have traded my choice of internship for any other one. I now have 3 days of summer before my new semester starts, which I will fill up with fishing and doing chores to get my house liveable. It is nice to be back where all the rocks are familiar and I know the history of the area (Idaho was torture because none of the people I was working with new the geologic history of the rocks). It was an awesome summer experience and I can't wait to see everyone and what they accomplished at AGU!

2011-08-15T12:47:36-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/reflecting_on_summer_goals

I've been home for a week now, so I thought it would be appropriate to write a blog post reflecting on my summer goals and the research experience as a whole.  I can't believe its already been eleven weeks since I arrived in New Mexico for orientation and met the other IRIS interns in person for the first time.  I feel that that week in NM was important for learning and bonding for all of us since we were scattered all over the country (with a couple exceptions) for the remainder of the summer, yet having very similar research experiences.  Getting to know the other interns created a built-in support system for when we were separated. I really enjoyed my time at CalTech - I learned a lot while I was there and accomplished nearly all of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the summer.  Going in I said that I wanted to become comfortable with various computer programming languages.  Once I actually started, I realized that I was already really comfortable using Linux and SAC because I had used them for previous seismology research.  That allowed me to focus on learning GMT, which became very important for plotting my results for viewing and analysis.  While I will never know every function that GMT is capable of, simply because they are innumerable, I do feel confident using it to create detailed maps.  Being able to problem solve and trouble shoot issues without any help gave me confidence in myself as well. By the end of my time in Pasadena, I had more results than we had originally hoped to get.  In my last post, I mentioned that I had calculated focal mechanisms through 2009.  But during my last week there, I managed to calculate mechanisms for 2008 as well, for a total of twenty-nine by the time I submitted my abstract to AGU.  Those 29 events produced significant results that showed patterns in terms of with vs without offshore seismic stations and geographic correlation with known fault locations.  I'm very proud of myself for accomplishing so much during my short time at CalTech and I'm very excited that I got some interesting results to present at AGU.  The webinar we all attended on communicating research will especially come in handy for preparing my poster and actually presenting at the conference to scientists with a wide array of knowledge. Although I have not begun working on my poster or studying for the GRE (yikes!), I will hopefully have plenty of time to do so onboard the ship for my research cruise.  My research experience is not complete, so I will post again when I return to California in several weeks, but I wanted to give a review of my summer while it was fresh in my mind and have time.  I start my senior year of college in only two weeks so I intend to relax before having to get back to work.  I am already very excited about going to the AGU conference in December and seeing all of my fellow interns again, but I have plenty of things to get done and keep me busy before then.

2011-08-13T19:18:31-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/california_baby_im_coming_home

Before I fly home today, I'm spending part of my last morning writing this last blog post. This week I did a lot of things, modifiying my cross sections to cover the clusters I could see based on epicenter locations and then began making time vs. magnitude plots of the earthquakes in each cluster in order to look for potential relationships between time and the magnitude Antelope estimated for each event  for the clusters of events (for example, a mainshock-aftershock kind of relationship, an earthquake swarm, etc.).  For some events, Antelope either couldn't or wouldn't calculate a magnitude and recorded it as -999. This confused me for a really long time because I was missing chunks of events from databases Mike had definitely run through the program. But we figured out we could still look at the temporal distribution in comparision with earthquakes Antelope could find a magnitude for, so we made each -999 earthquake magnitude between .1 and .9. Lastly, yesterday, I turned in my key to Mike's lab. Crazy! I think I accomplished a lot this summer. I definitely learned a lot more about computers - I can use Antelope well and have learned how to use GMT pretty well too. I think I have a much better grasp on things to think about when doing research too. I've made a lot of progress with everything, really, and have a much better idea of what it means and what it takes to do research. I'm excited to move forward on this project throughout the semester so I can make a great poster for AGU. AND I've officially lived on my own and cooked for myself all summer too! As badly as I've missed home all summer, I'm kind of sad to leave Ohio (I think this is mostly because the weather has been really gorgeous - perfect temperature, not humid - the last couple days). I think I've made it pretty clear how much I've learned in terms of being a researcher, but I think I've grown a lot as a person too. I'm not going to elaborate there, but I think I have a much better grasp on what I want to do in terms of graduation and going to school too. Anyway, I'm going to wrap this up and finish packing and cleaning. I'm STOKED to get home and am really starting to get antsy to make moves on getting myself ready to leave. The final countdown! For my last musical contribution, I have two songs. The first is awesome, possibly one of my favorite songs, and everyone seems to love it (including the people I introduced it to this summer): "Pick Up the Phone (Michael Van She remix)" by Dragonette (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXuPfDoH-SU). The second is called "Leaving on the Fifth" by Voxhaul Broadcast (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lvHDeBps_Y) and while I'm not leaving on the fifth - it's the thirteenth - I figured it was a relatively appropriate title and a good song as well. Looking forward to the future, see you all at AGU!

2011-08-13T08:53:17-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/week_7_workin_hard

So, after spending all day Monday begging, pleading, and running around to people's offices when they didn't answer my calls... I finally got SPW!!! This week Cathy's been away at Washington DC, so I''ve been pretty much on  my own.  She did help me start using SPW before she left, and hopefully I've been picking first arrivals correctly since then.  I made it through the 100 shots of the minivibe data and wrote a script in matlab (which I also recently got on the "big Mac" I'm using-- way easier than tyring to do things in excel/numbers) to convert the pick files into a format that Macray will happily read.  Next I have to use Macray to forward model the layers and velocities of the granitoid we are looking at. On the fun side of things, I have had a rental car this week, so I get to do more things.  I tried driving around during my lunch break and ending up at a casino called "The Cannery".  Of course I didn't want to spend real money, so I signed up for a free membership card that usually comes with some slot credits.  I happened to be lucky that day, so they gave me 200 free credits, which I have managed (through hard work/gambling efforts) to convert into over a hundred dollars of real money!  Yesterday I drove out to Red Rock Canyon, which has all these nice iron-red layers of aeoliean sedimentary rocks (not sure how to spell that, but I mean the kind that happens when you have wind and sand dunes)  it was almost dark when I arrived so I only had time to climb down into the rocks, wander for a few minutes, and climb back out before doing the "scenic drive" around the park.  Apparently I caught the bad key karma that my mom said she was having this week, because somewhere along the way I lost my apartment keys.  I'll have to have my roommate take me to copy his today. Ooh, and also I get to go to the test site again on Monday to calibrate refteks (and I do count as a whole person now). over and out.  

2011-08-12T17:19:05-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/results

YAY! I finally got some results yesterday, just in time for my presentation for the department. The presentation went well, then came the questions, which I struggled with a little, but it was ok overall. Anyway, here are the 3D images that show the energy release at each point for the three earthquakes. The first one is the first earthquake the 7.3. Followed by the 7.6, the 7.4 and then a figure with all three. So exciting!!! Yay results! Each series of snapshots is taken from an animation that rotates the field of view so you can see where the energy rupture was at each point. Today is my last day at Harvard. Miaki and I are going to go over the rubric later today to guage my progress over the summer. I will post my final update after I have officially turned over my keys. It's so strange to leave!

2011-08-12T10:21:58-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/agu_abstract_and_final_week

Here I am, starting my last week of the internship. It is amazing how fast time flew! I learned so much in these past 10 weeks and have had so many amazing experiences. I still have a lot of work to do though! I submitted my AGU abstract last Thursday! It is nice to have that off my shoulders. I am so excited to go present my research and see all the amazing work other scientists are doing! Now I can just buckle down and focus on the remaining week of my research. I am still working away at my data set so that I can have some more results. I will have to keep working on this next semester when I get some free time. I really do not mind though because I want to keep looking at the earthquake swarms and trying to figure out what is going on! This week I think I am going to try and get an old Matlab program, that another grad student wrote, running. This program is designed to create an envelope over the T-phases and then the different envelopes from different stations for one event are cross correlated. I am going to use this method to locate the swarms. Hopefully I can get the program working so then I can use it once I get home to locate each earthquake in the August and October swarm. Last weekend I went to Mount St. Helens! It was incredible! It is strange finally going somewhere you have wanted to go your entire life! In school we always talk about Mt. St. Helens so it was great to actually get to go see it! Unfortunately all the climbing permits were sold out so we did not get to climb to the top of it. We did go on some amazing hikes though! My favorite one was across the ridge where the Johnston Ridge Observatory is. We hiked along the ridge until we could see Mt. Rainer off in the distance and Spirit Lake was down below us. It is amazing how many dead logs are still int he blast zone! It was very interesting to see how nature was bouncing back. There were so many wild flowers growing on the hills. It was a beautiful time of year to visit! I will definitely have to go back one day to climb it. Cheers

2011-08-08T11:45:42-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/traveling_fiasco

Ahhh the joys of checking baggage... So yesterday, we left Virginia on our long and stressful journey to Boise. Our scheduled flight out of Virginia was at 5:45, but unfortunately due to bad weather, Chicago (where our plane was coming from) started experiencing delays by 11AM Central Time. Our flight departure was slowly but surely pushed back for a total of a 4 hour delay. We thought we had missed our connecting flight to Boise, so we rescheduled flights so that we could stay in Chicago for the night. When we finally arrived in Chicago at about 10:15pm, we saw that our Boise flight had been pushed back to 12:30am departure instead of the original time of 9:20. We scrambled around O'Hare and tried to get our baggage rerouted to Boise (the original destination tagged on the bags), but since Roanoke Airport retagged our luggage for Chicago (but didn't give us a sticker for it), we had no idea where the bags would go, and airport security was closing. We talked to a customer service representative from United and he told us that our bags were downstairs and we wouldn't be able to get back in that night. The grad student and I decided we would get the luggage, stay the night in Chicago and bring the luggage to our Prof. the next day because he had a meeting in Boise that he had to make by 10 the next morning. When we went to baggage claim, our bags were not there, and we talked to the serviceman there, who told us that our bags were on the plane to Boise. I was livid at this point and asked to talk to a supervisor. I told her the story (hoping to get a free hotel that night because they made us leave the airport while our bags were on the plane). She was probably the only person in the United States that works for an airport that takes pride in her job, and she got us back through security and onto our plane for Boise. When we arrived in Boise at 4am, we went to baggage claim, and it turned out that our luggage didn't make it, and was sitting in Chicago...at this point we all just laughed because it seemed like there was nothing we could do right in order to keep our bags. Finally made it to the hotel at about 5am, and got a good 3 1/2 hours of sleep.  We just had some hot breakfast (which was the first meal besides crackers and a Baby Ruth that I have had in 20 hrs), and are currently waiting for our bags to make it to Boise (I pray to God they make in on the flight that comes in at noon...), and are about to go get our transportation taken care of along with some other chores. Hectic day of traveling, and what did I learn from this? 1. Chicago sucks 2. never check baggage

2011-08-08T11:15:32-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/its_the_final_countdown

Last week in Boston! I can't believe I am almost done...things flew by this summer! While I am super excited and happy to be going home to MN for a week then back to San Diego for school, I can't help but feel like I am not done with Boston yet. There is way too much to do here to possibly fit it in 2 months, but I did make it to Fenway, which was my #1 tourist goal. I saw them play the Yankees (I could only get tickets through my friend), and although they are two of the teams I hate most in major league baseball, the fact that they are so iconic kind of makes up for it. The Red Sox won, and here is a picture from my seat (really awesome seat, actually). My friend almost caught a foul ball, but the giant guy next to him pushed him out of the way and grabbed it.  I also walked the Freedom Trail in Boston, which is a walking tour of some of the most historic places in the city. It's about 2.5  miles and brings you by the Boston Common, The State House, Park Street Church, The King's Chapel, the Benjamin Franklin statue, Old Corner Book Store, the site of the Boston Massacre, the Paul Revere House, and the Bunker Hill monument. I think there are other stops, but those are the ones I remember. Anyway, you can self lead the walk really easily because there is a line of red bricks in the middle of the road, which is super cool.  As far as finishing up my research project this week, I still have to look at the depth phases so I can resolve the depths of the three main earthquakes and I need to look at aftershocks to back project them properly. At this point, I am not very confident in finishing everything. I have to give a presentation to the department on Thursday, and we are going to see an infra-sound station installation in Harvard, MA (40 miles away) on Wednesday, so that gives me 2 days pretty much and that is too much to do. I haven't really worked on my poster yet...not sure when that will get done. I might just have to do it after I leave because I have too much to do here before Friday.  I am in the process of selling all of my bedroom furniture, which is weird because it's not mine, yet I am making a bit of money off of it, but I also had to clean all my stuff off, so I am very loosely packed (just chucked everything in my suitcase so the furniture can be taken out) but I will have to get creative to actually get everything to fit back inside. My mom helped me pack it to get out here and she is a magician when it comes to packing, so hopefully I can get everything in there.  People from home have completely filled my schedule for the 8 days I am home. I am really excited to see everyone, but hopefully I get enough rest before school starts up. I do have a few days in San Diego to hang out with my little sister, who is flying from MN to CA with me before school starts. We are going to Disneyland on the 25th and I am SO excited! Disneyland is my favorite place. I just wish it wasn't so expensive.  That's about all I have to report, I will probably add one more post when I am all finished and sitting at the airport. I am probably going to miss being able to say I am at Harvard. Everyone is so impressed when I say that. I kind of like being impressive. 

2011-08-08T10:18:11-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/one_week_left

So last week was a crazy week with the abstract being do. All of the data I had gone through all sumer had to be organized as well as coming up with some conclusions. After discussing with mike the day it was due we found that the code that I had written could still use a little work. We did come to some conclusions and I really do like my abstract. It reads really well and I think it will make for a very cool poster. Anyways I was super glad to get it submitted and get that off my chest. I have a lot of stuff to do before I depart. This project won't be over even after I leave. Mike will want to go through all the stuff that I have done. This leads me to the first thing that need to be done: a file directory. In order for Mike to understand all my files and organization I have decided to leave him a README file of all my files. This will help him navigate my mess of folders and also has a brief description of all the c-shell scripts I have written. The next thing to do is to make another figure for my poster. This figure is something mike wants to look at as it compares the amplitude and directivity of arriving surface waves with events that triggered tremor and ones that did not. Before I leave on Saturday I would like to have my poster done... or at least close to done because when I get back to Reno the busy life begins again. Another goal is to kick butt on my GRE on Friday. I have been reading the study book and it doesn't seem to bad....except the vocabulary section. I mean Seriously.... I haven't seen those words in any of my textbooks!   On a side note I went golfing yesterday and have been working on growing a beard. It is coming along quite nicely:  

2011-08-08T09:28:36-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/the_countdowns_continue

Countdowns I've had going in my head: 1. Abstract due. 8/4/11 This past week was the week of the abstract deadline for AGU so Monday to Thursday was spent writing, thinking about what might be going on, sending a draft to Mike, waiting for comments and revisions (which included a variety of activities, the most work related being modifying my maps and making real cross sections with GMT's pscoupe command), editing my abstract when he sent it back, and doing all that over again until I finally submitted it around 12:30 on Thursday. And as it turns out, the best thing (but by no means the most interesting thing) I learned from my abstract was that after mapping out the over 600 events I looked at over the course of the summer, the locations matched up very well with the events as Antelope chose them, which means no more picking P and S arrivals - hooray!! Friday I met with Mike and have begun making a map of where my cross sections are so we can really see what features we're observing with the clusters we see in the cross sections and on the epicenter density map Mike made earlier in the week. The next week will probably be more of the same map modification as Antelope runs through more of the MARS data we have. MARS was operating for about 18 months and we run 2-3 months worth of data for Antelope to make picks on at a time, which usually takes around 18 or so hours. 2. Move out, lose air conditioning, move in to Stefany's. 8/5/11 This past week was also the week that mine (and Brady's) leases ended on our apartments, so we spent most of Friday morning cleaning up our respective places and moving out. Hopefully I got everything. We're now camped out in Stefany's apartment (thanks again, Stef, if you ever read this...), being extra clean, and watching dvds we rented from the library down the street/ 3. ONE WEEK TIL I GET HOME. 8/6/11 A minor celebratory moment. I cannot wait to go home. 4. Make myself start running again (there is still no pool access). 8/7/11 Something I debated doing yesterday, but decided against it and went for a lazy Saturday instead. I went for literally a 20 minute run outside in the middle of the day today (a highly questionable life decision considering the humidity but I was getting antsy so I did it anyway - HUGE step for me, the aquatics girl). I've been doing a lot more running this summer (in the air conditioned apartment complex gym) and it's getting much less onerous (ie. I've made a crazy amount of progress in terms of distance and actually motivating myself to do it) but still, I've got a ways to go. Hopefully this week I can talk myself into continuing to wake up early and go running (hopefully for longer than 20 minutes) before work while it's still "cool" outside. 5. FLY HOME. 8/13/11 My number one, most important, favorite ever, time-cannot-move-fast-enough countdown. There are way too many things I'm looking forward to in getting home to even consider listing them here. But I'm stoked to see my family and my dog and my friends from high school. Also, I'm also dying for there to be no more humidity. Seriously, get me home. I'm going to end my list of countdowns there, though there are still several things going on that list (going to Hawaii for a research trip with my department from school, my 21st birthday, seeing all of my friends from school...). Anyhow, with the busy work week ahead, and the fantastic things I have to look forward to at home, my song for the week (sent to me by my brother) is 'No Rest for the Weary' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIqMIrmpUjc) by Blue Scholars. I just have to keep at it and the countdowns will continue!

2011-08-07T17:25:59-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/pink_posters_parties_and_macaroons

So after today I'll have 2 more weeks of work. I submitted my abstract and am now doing the final bits of work. I also started working on my poster, which I'm doing in hot pink Hrvoje said, when I asked how it looked, "It's very girly." And I agree, but believe that it's okay since I'm a girl. So in other news, My last day in the office, Friday the 19th, we're having a little potluck. I'm making chili in my rice cooker, cornbread, and macaroons. If you've never had a macaroon, you haven't lived. But anyway, Mallory is making hummus and bringing in veggies and pita bread to dip with, and I'm not sure what Surya is bringing. There's a new girl, a German exchange student who is doing the same sort of thing that we did (an internship through some German company) and she's bringing drinks. We're going to try to get Hrvoje to come too, because we're pretty sure that he'll make something delicious. But we'll see how that goes. The Sunday before I leave I'll be doing my souvenir shopping for the people who demand Australian goodies from back home. There's this really cute market place in the suburb that I'll be staying in my last week, and they have a lot of cool things. So I'll be doing that. All in all, I'm happy to have gone here, but I'm so excited to be going home soon. I didn't think I'd miss it as much as I do, and I really miss eating decently. I'm really sick of ramen. My roommate scolded me yesterday for not adding any veggies to my ramen, because it "isn't healthy". Ah well. Alright, that's it for now!

2011-08-04T18:16:27-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/abstract

Here is the completed version of my abstract for AGU! So relieved to have it submitted so I no longer have to worry about it.  Deep earthquakes make up approximately one-quarter of all earthquakes, yet current understanding of mechanisms for deep (300-700 km) earthquake generation fails to explain why deep range earthquakes occur. Various mechanisms, such as metastable phase change, have been proposed, however, there is a lack of observational constraints on the properties of deep earthquakes, which deter our understanding. In order to progress our knowledge of the deep earth, such as its chemistry, mineralogy, and dynamics, robust constraints on the mechanisms of deep earthquakes are required. The goal of this project is to explore the mechanism(s) behind deep earthquakes through studying the 2010 Moro Gulf deep earthquake sequence using a continuous back-projection technique. The Moro Gulf sequence features a ‘triplet’ of earthquakes with hypocentral depths between 585 and 640 km. The triplet earthquakes are particularly unusual, because they are large magnitude events (Mw7.3, 7.6, and 7.4) that occurred within an hour and a half of each other, which does not agree with the Gutenberg-Richter relationship. No other triplet sequences of this magnitude have been recorded within such a short time period. Another anomalous characteristic of these earthquakes is the emergent waveforms of the sequence. Typically, deep earthquakes have impulsive waveforms, which is thought to be associated with more rapid stress drop than shallow events, for which the stress drop occurs more gradually. The back-projection technique is an efficient method to constrain earthquake rupture properties, such as rupture direction, rupture speed, location, timing, and relative energy release of an earthquake. It requires high-quality data from a dense network of seismic stations covering a large area, and we use data from the High-Sensitivity Seismograph Network (Hi-net) in Japan and US Transportable Array (US-TA). The technique creates a grid of potential source locations around the hypocenter. The seismograms are time-shifted and stacked at each grid point. The data from the three earthquakes are filtered to a frequency range of 0.8-2 Hz in order to maximize the resolution from the back-projection, and to capture the first arriving P-waves in the waveforms. Another crucial step is aligning the P- and PKP(DF)-phases for Hi-net and US-TA, respectively. Since alignment has a strong influence on the back-projection, we aligned the US-TA phases using an aftershock because smaller magnitude earthquakes often improve alignment. The back-projection technique has been used in previous studies to investigate both shallow (0-100 km) and intermediate-depth (100-300 km) earthquakes. Using back-projection on deep earthquakes is expected to increase depth resolution results from the incorporation of depth phases, that, when combined with downward take-off phases, reveal a more accurate hypocentral depth. Also, better spatial resolution is achieved by the combination of the Hi-net and US-TA arrays, which overlap signals at a more accurate location of the rupture. Back-projection analysis of the Moro Gulf sequence is expected to provide a detailed rupture process of these deep events with high depth and spatial resolution.  

2011-08-04T17:58:20-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/abstract_done_time_for_fieldwork

Finally submitted the abstract, and I must say...it looks good. Now I am sitting here in Blacksburg on lockdown at VT because some 9 years olds said they saw someone with "a gun" (someone holding a piece of cloth with something under it). Good for the people that didn't want to have summer school today. I was completely oblivious to this when I was going to school this morning about 20 minutes after the sighting. The campus alarm was going off, but I had no idea they had a campus alarm...and rode my bike right through the middle of campus wondering where all the students were and why their were cops all over the place. Got to my building and some guy opened up the locked doors for me (kind of stupid of him, since I'm a complete stranger) and told me what was happening. I laughed and talked with some people some more, not sure why someone would be scared of a gun when its 9:30 in the morning in the summer at a college campus...I figure if they were gonna do something crazy, they would wait till school started at least. Other than that, nothing exciting happened with that situation. Now that the abstract is turned in, I'm not sure what to do over my next 4 days in Blacksburg before I ship off to Idaho for fieldwork. I do need to say goodbye to some buddies I made at the local sports bar Saturday night I'm glad I found some people that could talk sports around here. I'm leaving for Idaho on Sunday around 5:30 pm and arriving at midnight..what better flight could you ask for? After that, we will take a 5 hour drive to Challis (a bustling town of ~200 residents) and work there for a couple days, while slowly making our way back to Boise. We will be in Idaho for a week, and finally head home the next Sunday. I'm looking forward to seeing rocks again, I know a lot of people like the nice green terrain around this part of the country, but I think I thrive in a more arid environment. It was pretty cool to be able to see a river that had water in it everyday though, instead of 2 weeks a year like in Phoenix. I will definitely miss the small town atmosphere and not having to pay a dime for gas all summer, but am excited to get home. The biggest news of the day was that Arizona State's football team is preseason ranked 26th, and is coming to upset the Pac-12. We have a lot of returning players, and this year WILL be the first step in regaining our long lost reputation of a being a football powehouse! Too bad it waited until I was a senior, but I'll take what I can get.

2011-08-04T14:11:30-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/home_from_santa_cruz

Today I submitted my abstract for the American Geophysical Union December meeting in San Francisco. I finished running a detection program on the land data stations from December 7 1999 to June 19 2001. As you can see below, tremor was identified almost every day, and some major events were noted.                               Two different detection runs were used. The light blue run is only the stations from Susan's network, while the dark blue run included an IRIS station (HDC) that was 200 km away as a reference.  Tremor should not span 200 km-- so if any was detected matching the HDC station it would automatically get thrown out for being a regional earthquake.  Although my time at UCSC is done for this summer, I will still be helping go through the data and looking at the OBS data to prepare the poster for AGU. I have learned a lot from this summer and am excited to keep learning when I return to Cornell  

2011-08-03T12:39:32-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/abstract_submitted

So after a long hard battle of perfecting my abstract, sending it, resending it, reperfecting it, over and over, I finally submitted it. It was very close to the 3500 character limit. I'm almost surprised it didn't go over. Anyway, now I don't really feel like doing anything for the rest of the day... Even though I still have mounds of stuff to do. So yeah, all set for San Francisco and AGU in December! Woo!

2011-08-02T23:15:41-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/final_stretch

With less than 2 weeks left here in New Haven before I head back to South Carolina, I am starting to tie up some of the loose ends on my project. The forwarding modeling code has proven itself to be non-intuitive and frustrating at times but it is very satisfying when you get a feature to match. I have been spending most of my time trying to create a model for the KGM station, which is one of the middle stations along the Ryukyu arc. It is interesting to see the features that show up and change across multiple stations. There is one in particular the we see on the northern three stations that I am going to attempt to model next (wish me luck). I just submitted my AGU abstract yesterday (glad to check that off the list). Unfortunately the AGU dates are the week of my finals but hopefully I won't have to much trouble working it out. I have also started putting my poster together in my spare time. I don't have much more than a layout with my name and abstract in there yet but at least it is a start. Went into NYC to visit an old friend over the weekend. Took my first ride on the NYC subway system (a little sad considering I have lived in the NE most of my life). It was an experience. While I do not miss the oppresive heat, I am getting excited to head back to SC in a few weeks. I apologize that there are no new and pretty figures to show, creating a workable model has taken more time and finesse than I had originally anticipated.

2011-08-02T15:31:42-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/another_setback_week_6

My advisor has just told me that she wants me to view the data in wiggle form, not as the color-coded amplitudes that the program I have (JRG) makes.  This means I have to wait for SPW to come in order to start processing my data, which might hopefully come by the end of this week. In the mean time I am working on my agu poster and hoping I will be able to actually do my picks and make my model before the end of the summer.

2011-08-02T10:25:49-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/pressure_is_on

Ok, so Eric looked over the code all weekend and couldn't find what was wrong with it, but he went though and back projected the HINET data from scratch and it seemed to work, meaning the data got screwed up somewhere along the line. So now I have to go back and start from scratch AGAIN to see if I can make it work. I am running the alignment code right now so hopefully now that I have done this about 100 times or so, it will go quickly.  (**little update** It still didn't work on my machine, but it worked on Eric's...that makes no sense to me, but Eric is transferring the raw code over to my machine to see if that fixes things. Fingers crossed because if that doesn't work, we will both be shooting in the dark as to what it is that isn't working. Also, I am hoping that the problem with the HINET data doesn't affect the TA data because they both take so long to fix and things are down to the wire!) (**little update#2** There was something wrong with the data. Not the code. I don't really know if that is better or worse, but Eric got new data and it works better! Below is a figure of the HINET data that is lookin' good! Such great news even though I still have a long way to go before we are out of the woods!)  (YAY!!!) I have two weeks left and I have a long list of tasks to finish. I have to finish my abstract (today or tomorrow), back project everything successfully, look at depth phases (which I haven't even been briefed about), figure out why in the world deep earthquakes occur and the mechanism behind them, create a presentation to deliver to the department, and oh, I should probably put my poster together too. Oh man.  During my remaining time in Boston, I also have to contact more grad advisors, figure out my registration issues for fall semester from 3000 miles away when they insist I talk to them in person, pack, sell all of the bedroom furniture I have been using (thank goodness for Craigslist), get last minute souvenirs for friends and family, and sleep. The last one is my favorite.  I hope all of that is possible. Wish me luck! 

2011-08-01T15:45:43-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/my_last_week_for_now

Last week, I finished calculating focal mechanisms with and without the island stations for all twenty-two seismic events that I identified as being relevant to my project.  (I realize that I said 23 in my last post, but apparently I am incapable of counting correctly.)  There were several events in 2009 that were greater than M4.0, which were exciting to look at.  I find it truly remarkable that a small difference in magnitude makes a rather significant change in the P-wave amplitude.  This made picking the polarities for these events a lot easier, especially since the noise from stations in the LA Basin usually overpowers the signal at lower magnitudes.  After comparing the focal mechanism solutions for the same event with and without the island stations, several things became quite apparent.  While including the island stations increased the accuracy of the solutions (by decreasing errors in fault plane uncertainty and focal mechanism probability), it did not always make the solutions look visibly different.  Those that did look significantly different also showed no pattern in becoming either more strike-slip or more thrust-like. Since my calculations and analysis are done for the most part, I've been able to focus on writing my abstract so that it is ready for submission to AGU on Thursday.  I have found that writing an abstract for research is a lot different than writing an abstract for something like a lab report or term paper, where there is a defined answer to the problem you are trying to solve.  I'm trying to represent my research and findings in a concise, positive light without making it sound like I have made the greatest discovery of the century - not exactly the easiest task I've had all summer. This week I also need to add bathymetry data to all of the maps that I have created so that some of the offshore faults, scarps, and other tectonic features are more prominent.  This is especially important since some of the faults are not included in the fault model that I am using, but are obvious in the bathymetry data.  I'm going to work on going further back in time with my focal mechanism calculations so that the seismicity patterns are even more apparent, although this is not a priority. This week also happens to be my last week at CalTech.  This campus and Pasadena, in general, are both gorgeous and I'm going to miss it.  But, having been away for over two months now, I'm more than ready to go home.  I do get to come back to California fairly soon for the research cruise in early September, which means that my research will not be completed by the time I fly back home to New Jersey on Saturday. 

2011-08-01T13:58:52-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/2_weeks_left

I wasn't as good as I would have liked to be on keeping up on my blogs. It seems like I post about every two weeks instead of every week. Anyways I have been busy all week writing scripts to look at my waveforms in different ways. Mike was on vacation this week so I was left to my thought. He will be back in tomorrow so I can discuss with him. I tried to compare the angles at which the surface waves arrive in Alaska and see if there was a specific angle that generated the tremor. I did a fancy GMT map to plot the relationships and I think I may have found something. I want to talk it over with mike first to see if I have enough evidence to claim that though. Anyways I am working on my abstract hope to have it submitted at least a day early. Hopefully Mike will help me get it sounding really good. I have already started putting together figures for my poster. I know it's not due till December but I would like to get most of it done while I have time, resources and all the information fresh in my brain. I watched a lot of X-games this week and plan on being in the office early tomorrow to talk with mike. Hope everyone else’s projects are going well!

2011-07-31T21:58:49-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/3_weeks_left

Oh boy, there's so much going on! There are 3 weeks left, and the AGU abstract is due in what, 3 days? ....I feel like this summer has totally flown by me and I missed it entirely. 3 weeks left means I need to get on things. I have so much left to do! I have no idea if I'll be able to finish it in time, but I sure am going to try. I have to move out of my apartment in 2 weeks as the owner of the room I'm renting is coming back, and I'll be staying at a bed and breakfast. I'm kind of excited, for one week it might seem like I'm actually on a working vacation. It'll be nice, I hope. That's it for now, yeah, just wish me luck, will you?

2011-07-31T20:45:33-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/keepin_it_goin

As I mentioned before, this week was mostly dedicated to making more picks on events to try and get up to 600. I made it! Friday afternoon. However, after mapping them on my epicenters map and looking at the file that I'd created for GMT to use, I discovered that I'm only mapping 441 events. This is fine, I expected less than 600, but based on the record I've been keeping, I expected it to map 458 or 459 events. I'm 17 or 18 events off in my record and while I'm not worried about it, I would like to know why. Anyway, this coming week will be dedicated to looking at my maps and previous maps of tremor and major earthquakes and making comparisons so I can write my abstract (this is ACTUALLY my priority this week) before Thursday! (yikes...) In other news, the university pool is now closed until August 15 (at which point I'll be home - hooray!!) which is a huge bummer. BUT I have located Oxford's public pool, so maybe I'll figure out a way to get myself over there in the evenings so I don't have to take up running every day. More importantly, my lease ends this week and I have to move out by Friday. This means a substantial amount of packing and shipping a couple boxes of apartment things home before I move out and into Stefany's (one of the grad students here and former IRIS intern) apartment for my final week. I hate packing and shipping so I'm really not all that excited about this but it does mean I'm closer to heading home so that helps things a little. Anyway, in order to actually get going on this I really need to do my laundry. Mostly because this is the last time I have easy access to a washer/dryer. I'm going do that now, but I'll leave you with my newfound California song: "California" by Radical Something (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53hindKbUyI). I'm chillin, keeping it going, but I'm really feeling ready to head home.

2011-07-31T13:39:24-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/research_cruisin

Hello from 30 km off the coast of Washington in the Pacific Ocean! I am currently helping with a deployment of Columbia-Lamont’s new ocean bottom seismometers! Lamont is testing a new style of seismometer casing that will not be able to be caught in fishing nets. They kind of look like flying saucers with the battery, data logger, and the seismometer contained on the inside. We are deploying 18 of them over the course of 10 days. It has been quite an adventure! The day before we left Newport I spent all day painting the alien like casings with heavy-duty bottom paint that discourages animals to grow on them. The casings are about the size of a 2 or 3 person tent, so they are pretty big! By the end of the day I was feeling a bit woozy from the paint haha. Last Sunday we left port to travel the seas! I transitioned into living on the sea very well. I did not get sea sick at all, I actually think it is fun being tossed about by the waves. The deployments keep getting smoother as we get use to putting them together and then deploying them. There is a steel cable that is hooked up to the giant seismometer apparatus and then they are lowered all the way to the sea floor (anywhere from 180 m to 800m deep). The other day the acoustic release that separates the cable from the seismometer was lost at sea. The cable broke and the seismometer dropped 100 m to the ocean floor. We tried signaling the seismometer and release its buoy so we could find it, but we think it flipped over. I do not know if they are going to be able to recover that seismometer. We had to go into Grey’s Harbor to find a new acoustic release so that we could continue deploying seismometers! My shift is from midnight to noon so the lab is pretty quite besides the 2 other people on their shift at the same time. I get to watch the sunrise every day though! It is nice because I have had some time to work on my AGU abstract and a little bit of my research. My jobs have consisted of surveying the sight were we drop the seismometers and also doing an acoustic survey of a methane vent on the bottom of the ocean. Surveying the drop site is so fun! We send an acoustic wave at 12 kHz to a receiver on the seismometer. The receiver bounces back energy at 12 kHz. It is awesome because you can actually hear the frequencies that we are looking at! In seismology the frequencies are so low you cant hear them. We can hear the onboard instrument “pinging” down to the receiver and the receiver pinging back to us! We can also hear other ocean noise in the speaker onboard. The other day we heard another ships echosounder and what we thought were dolphins! The captain drives the boat in a X shape over the drop site and we ping the instrument every minute and take the lat-long and two way travel time (ms) so that the Lamont team can go back and precisely locate their instrument. The other project we have been working on at night is really fun too! We have been doing a survey on a methane vent on the bottom of the ocean. The last time it was imaged was in 2009. So we drive 12 lines over the top of the vent (6 N-S and 6 E-W) that are ~0.25 mile long. We use the echosounder to put out 4 kHz and 12kHz signal that bounces off whatever it hits in the ocean and comes back to the ship. Using this method, we can see what is under the water! So when we travel over the vent we can see all these bubbles coming up from the seafloor. Another cool thing we see is a plankton layer at about 50 to 60 m deep. The plankton layer gets SUPER thick around the vent, which is interesting that they like the vent. The other thing we see are large schools of fish eating the plankton above the vent! (Keep in mind that it is mostly just groups of dots on the screen but we can figure out what it is… if I ever figure out how to post images on the blog then I will put a picture up). So we have done about 20 passes over the vent. My advisor is going to look more at the data when we get back to shore. I have been really enjoying looking at the echosounder output and trying to figure out what is going on under the surface. As a SCUBA diver it has been killing me not being able to go under the water to see what is around. The echosound is about as good as it’s going to get! If we have enough time, we are going to send an ROV (Research operating underwater vehicle) with a camera on it to check one of the seismometers we think feel on its side. I have been lucky enough to see some wild life from up on the deck though! So far I have seen a pod of ~20 Pacific white side dolphins, sunfish, jellyfish, lots of sea birds, albacore tuna (which we caught) and two blue sharks! Hopefully I will get to see a whale before I get off the ship! I saw a whale a few weekends ago off the coast near Newport, but I would love to see one from the ship! I have 3 more days on my cruise and then I am finished! It has been such an amazing experience so far. I am so lucky that I get to do this.  The sea is so beautiful and different from solid land. Last night was the first clear night we had out on the ocean. Standing out on the deck looking out into the Milky Way was one of those memories I will have forever. I can’t believe I am almost done with my internship! I am not ready to leave Oregon but I have to get back to school!  I hope I can make the best of the last two weeks and finish up my research.  

2011-07-30T10:02:57-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/exciting_week

I finally got to go to the test site this week, and it was about as awesome as I thought it would be.  I only got to go on Tuesday and Wednesday, but I don't mind becasue it does get hot out there.  My day started at 4:45am when I had to leave my apartment to walk to the bus stop.  Then I got to ride this really comfy bus until about 7; I got to sleep a little and look at the amazing views of the mountains at sunrise.  Then the guys I am working with (Ryan Emmitt and Bob White) drove me out across the test site (which is bigger than Rhode Island) to area 15.  There was lots to look at in the test site: craters of varying sizes, radioactive warning signs, old equipment and trailers they don't use anymore but can't throw away because it's radioactive, the war room, other trailers they do still use, and pretty tilted strata. Once we finally got to our test bed (where the SPE explosions happen) I went with Ryan out on a Mule (a small ATV), and we got to go off-roading to get the geophone receiver locations.  Some of them we had to hike to because they were too far up hill, but that was fun too.  My only job was to record the data on whether the geophones were working/ if any animals had eaten the cables.  This means I had plenty of time to play with rocks.  I saw lots of huge K-spar phenocrysts in the quartz-monzonite, nearly perfect calcite crystals, quartzite, some of the sedimentary layers, and lots of pretty colorful welded tuff.  Oh, and also we saw a snake. On Wednesday we finished checking all the geophone lines, and after doing a brief gps survey of the slope next to the test bed, I got to go on a tour of the test site.  I got to see the sedan crater (part of the nukes for peace program), some more equipment that normal people don't get to see on the tour, the BEEF (big explosive experiment facility) bunker, and some videos of explosions.  It was a pretty good day.  I kinda wish I was allowed to take pictures. Just to add to the awesomeness of my week, I have finally gotten access to one of my data sets (minivibe refraction data)!  And with help from rob Abbott (an SPE person from Sandia) I've gotten it in a form that can be read by the program I have, and I can even reasonably see first arrivals in it!  Now I get to start going through and really playing with the filters and times so I can make a good model. 

2011-07-29T16:19:26-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/its_those_little_things

So this is a mid-week post... not traditional, I guess, but I just had a major discovery in Antelope that I felt the need to share.  Mike is gone this week, so I've put map-making and abstract-writing on the back burner for the time being and am just focusing on getting close to 600 picks (the general number around which Mike suggested I aim for for my project). ANYWAY, instead of clicking on every single one of my arrivals to indicate that I want it to be used in calculating the hypocenter, I can just click on part of the dbloc2 screen where the picks are and drag the mouse across, down, whatever and as long as the P or S pick is inside the box I created, it will be turned to black and therefore counted when I tell Antelope to "Locate."  I can't believe it took me almost 8 weeks to figure that out. What a winner.

2011-07-27T14:15:38-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/theres_always_something

Hey guys!  This past week I went back and re-filtered all my data to sync everything up (time, location, depth, and magnitude) so I could properly combine the TA and HINET arrays in the back projection code. I successfully did all that (the second time around anyway) and started combining the arrays and getting the back projection results and getting super excited that something this summer was working the way we expected and then BAM! The back projection animation looked funky. The code allows me to plug in all the information for one array, then a ton of other data and then the info for the other array and the code weights the arrays so that I get a pretty picture. Well, turns out the weighting hard wired into the code is way off for whatever reason, so when I put the TA data in as my first array, the TA animation dominates and you can barely see any trace of the HINET and vice versa when the HINET data is first. So this is no good since they should look the same no matter which array I input first. Therefore, Eric is going to take a look at the code, which I am super thankful for because if I had to try and figure out a code that's not even mine, it would take the rest of the year probably. Another issue that I noticed is that the HINET animation looks really, really noisy with the new 3D code, which I am not sure what to do with yet. I am sure Eric will address that too. The picture below is the back projection results for the TA (top) and HINET (bottom) when each are dominant. The top sequence and bottom sequence should look the same. Obviously, that is not the case. And you can see how noisy the HINET is. Uh oh.   Since Eric is currently working on a paper that he has to submit soon, fixing the code is on the back burner for today, which leaves me with two options: look at depth phases in the data or start my AGU abstract. Since I have been stressing a little about the abstract, I am going to work on that first. Even though we don't have any results yet, I can work on introducing the back projection technique and some of our methods and hopefully next week we can splice the results into it before submission.  In other news, I am now 21 years old. Which doesn't mean too much for me since I don't drink at all, but I still had a super fun birthday. Although I had to work all day, I still went out to dinner at a yummy italian restaurant and all my friends from home called to wish me a happy birthday. My sister sent me a box full of balloons and decorations, and now it looks like my room is being taken over by the balloons. I am going to Providence this weekend with my friend from MN, and that will be a good time. I am definitely looking forward to it.  That's about all I have to report. I have been increasing my hours at the lab to finish in time. Hopefully I can still pull this off!

2011-07-27T10:05:25-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/fortran_and_portland

Last week was my first forray into Fortran programming (say that 5 times fast). I'm using a Fortran based program called Hypoinverse to get preliminary earthquake locations. I was really nervous because I don't have that much computer programming experience. Programming always makes me nervous. It's so detail oriented, and I am more of a big picture person. Luckily, writing the files for Hypoinverse wasbn't that bad. I was able to cut and paste most of the code and only change a few numbers. My Dad is pretty old school and has done a lot of Fortran programming. So when I told him that I was using Fortran he was really excited. He said that Fortran was really easy, "a lot like english". Right...well, english isn't his first language. Over the weekend I met my parents in Portland. We had a lot of fun. Mostly we ate yummy food and walked around downtown. The farmers' market was huge and had tons of delicious berries. The fruit is amazing here. For some reason I am havign trouble uploading photos right now but I will post some of the sonic boom traces soon.

2011-07-26T12:10:56-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/started_from_nothing_ended_up_with_everything

So I FINALLY installed my seismic site. What makes mine different from the traditional sites is the use of sand as insulation as opposed to foam. This is supposed to eliminate some of the background noise. Especially here in Puerto Rico because of all the cars and the waves always coming in. It has been collecting data for almost a week. Tomorrow I will  uninstall it and compare that data with the traditionally insulated seismometer and use PQLX to determine if the hypothesis proves true. As far as the code for calculating the focal mechanism, I am close to being done but not 100% yet. If I had to guess, I'd say I'm about 85% done. There is still soemthing I have to do in GMT that I haven't gotten the chence to do yet that I will be working on this week. Courtesy of Michael's request, here are some figures of the focal mechanism code in action. Please ignore my typing errors on the first one haha So basically this is how I imput it into terminal and it spits out the focal mechanism. It's in spanish and I haven't figured out how to put it in English, but hey it still works. There are 13 consistencies that are all possible answers which is pretty good I think. This is the beach ball depiction of the focal mechanism that all the geology kids love to play with. I have some other pictures but they're on my camera which I have yet to upload to the computer. I'll put them up on my next blog. Last Sunday I went ziplining over the rainforest in the mountains. 9 ziplines in total and all were at least 600 ft about the ground. The view was amazing since we were so high over the mountains. I would have taken a picture but it's kidn of hard to do that while holding on for your life. Plus it wasn't allowed anyways. The last one I went on was called The Beast. It was 4700 ft. (Almost a mile!) and 800 feet in the air. I superman(ed) the whole thing

2011-07-25T11:24:01-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/my_last_day

Today turns out today is my last day. I was originally supposed to work through the end of the week, but plans change. My advising professor has to go out of town for the rest of the week, which would have left me here with no much to do since I have some figures for my poster ready and I finished my abstract this morning. I still have details to figure out so really I am not done with my internship, but I am done with my part here in Indiana. I will be driving back to school tomorrow, where I will go back to the research I was working on earlier this summer. My research there is also in seismology, so not really that big of a change, just a different location and another abstract to work on. For the rest of you who are finishing up and writing abstracts, I wish you good luck!

2011-07-25T11:10:22-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/record_sections

So one of the things Hrvoje asked me to do was record sections of my PcP-P traces. After a long hard battle with GMT and C Shell, I was able to make one for each event and they came out nice. Here's one: This is the best PcP-P event I found, and it was cool because it was in the Mediterranean, which Hrvoje's data set didn't include much of. So I lucked out!   Next stop: P and PcP ray paths through tomographic models!

2011-07-25T03:09:07-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/just_keep_swimming

The title for this week's post is symbolic of a lot of things this week. First off, it appears to have become our intern motto in the last week because everyone seems to be stressing about projects coming along more slowly than they thought or abstracts being due soon... I'm in the stressing group for similar reasons, but I'm trying not to worry. Everything will get done and I'll get there. Second, it's hot as hell out here. This weather is the worst. It's mid 90s every day with close to 80% humidity... so it feels like at least a suffocating 104 degrees every single day. It's horrible (west coast me PLEASE). I'm pretty sure I would have passed out or something else bad from water loss (because I sweat unreal amounts of water out of my body) if it weren't for the air conditioning in my apartment and Brady and Martin's beautiful cars which they drive to the freezing cold lab. And the pool. Just gotta keep swimming! In terms of work this week, I've been moving along with the same things as before: making wave picks and modifying my maps. The most exciting things this weel were breaking 400 on events I looked at in Antelope and figuring out why my maps were mapping almost 100 events less than I had gone through.  I finally put my list of event IDs and whether they were good, bad, ok, or skipped into an excel document and figured out that in the 403 events I had looked at by the end of the day on Friday, I had either skipped or been forced to delete (due to their attachment to an event I had changed by making picks on) slightly over 100 events. Hence the mystery of mapping only 296 or so was solved! My next question is why it doesn't look like anywhere near 300 events on my map.... Maybe it's just me since I don't have much experience judging the number of points on a map, but Mike was mildly confused as well, so we've come to the conclusion (for now) that there is overlap of events that we just can't see that well. I've also made 8 longitudinal cross sections of the Jalisco block which I'll probably look at more critically this coming week.  Outside of that, I've really been laying low. Like I said, the weather has been miserable so I've gone into what I'm going to call 'self preservation mode' (this is the Northern Californian in me...) and taken to staying indoors, drinking a lot of water, eating popsicles, and napping. Not too bad way to spend my evenings/this weekend but at the same time, really not exciting. Anyway, I've listened to a lot of music this week. I finally downloaded the entire Miami Horror - love them - album 'Illumination' so I listened to that most of the week. I highly recommend it. There's also a great remix by Fred Falke of their song 'Make You Mine' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch9khBsN4Lg) that I listened to quite a lot.  The other song that made it into my walk-to-the-pool/general workout mix was Stuart Price's remix of Kylie Minogue's (yep, you read that right) 'Get Outta My Way' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTLLpIlj0Vw). Gotta enjoy that one, haha. Stay cool!

2011-07-24T10:19:01-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/tomography

On to tomography! Dr. Hole's tomography code has been run, rerun, run again, deleted, and repeated. In order to run the tomography, I had to make an average 1D velocity model over all of my travel time picks, and let his code adjust my velocity model as needed in order to fit my data in different locations. The geology along my seismic refraction line obviously varies and can be observed on the surface, where lacustrine deposit surround rhyolite volcanics near the middle of the Salton Trough, so obviously an average 1D model in an area that goes from sediment to volcanics is not perfectly accurate. Luckily for me, the tomography code can fix this by ray tracing and adjust the velocities of the subsurface to their (near) actual positions. I used many different smoothing and regridding ratios, along with average velocity models that I knew were wrong (either too fast or too slow) to test the consistency of the model with regard to my picks. The model looks very consistent regardless of velocity model and smoothing characteristics, which is a very good sign! I apologize to those who like to look at pretty pictures, but I would like to save my results for the AGU conference in December! But I will tell you that we have found some very interesting things in relation to the volcanics in the Salton Trough, and a possibly previously unknown feature to the northeast of the volcanics. Dr. Hole was out of town this week, so I'm very excited to talk with him about my results and see what he has to say. Also, I made a rough draft of my abstract for AGU, and have started to write some of my sections for the poster presentation. My project is moving at the perfect pace and I am on schedule to get everything done in order to put together an incredible poster. Also, to unwind after the abstract due date, we will be traveling to Idaho to do some fieldwork (possibly mapping!) broadband deploying, and maybe even some drilling. Details are still up in the air, but a week out of the office in Idaho looking at geology is the perfect way to wrap up the summer!

2011-07-23T12:24:48-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/working_saturday_is_more_productive_than_the_entire_week

So I went in to work today to get some things done. I think I must socialize with my office mates more than I realized, because I got far more done when they weren't there! But, anyway, I finished my PcP-P measurements for all 27 events, 3 of which were total crap, but my goal was to get at least 10 decent events. It turned out that my criteria for picking events in hopes of finding good PcP was very good. Anyway, I finished the measurements, wrote a program that organized them all based on the quality of the measurement, and created ps files for all of the Grade 1 and 2 measurements. Hrvoje wants me to print them out, which disturbs me slightly because it's so much wasted paper! But still, I'll get over it. After that, I took my measurements from each event and plotted them all into ps files, to show which events were the best, which ones sucked, etc. Then, I took all of the data and plotted it all onto a map, first which just Grade 1 quality measurements and then with Grade 1 and 2. AFTER THAT.... I wrote another GMT script to plot my PcP-P residuals with Hrvoje's. Here's what I have: These are Hrvoje's events from his 2002 data set. I used Adobe illustrator to show the major holes in the data so that I could see if I had achieved my goal of having helped fill in the holes.   Then, I plotted my events using the same holes, to see where I had filled in: Then I showed the holes that still need to be filled in: So yeah, that's what I did on my Saturday.

2011-07-23T05:53:03-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/gah

Ok, so I am kind of getting sick of this whole 2 steps forward 1 step back thing(I know I switched them, but 2 and 1 is more relevant to my experience). In order to combine my arrays with the TA data aligned with an aftershock, I needed to sync the time, location, depth, and magnitude information for both arrays. No problem there. I also had to filter both of them so all my data had the same sampling rate. So I went through and did that, but ended up having to decrease my sampling rate to 0.2 (from 0.05 for the TA data and 0.02 for the HINET data). Then I went through and realigned all the HINET data (which takes about an hour each because there is so much data) based on this new sampling rate only to be told at today's group meeting that the HINET originally had a sampling rate of 0.01 instead of 0.02, meaning I originally filtered it with a decimation factor of 2 instead of 1 (which was week 1 when I didn't know what a decimation factor really was and was only following Eric's instructions) then ended up re-filtering it yesterday, which isn't good. So now I am going back to re-filter all the original HINET data so I will have a sampling rate of 0.1, but that means I also have to re-filter all the TA data again too AND I have to redo ALL of my alignments for the bazillionth time! Gah! So yeah, needless to say I will be putting in extra hours to do that.  On the semi-bright side, Eric is going to go in and do the deep phase alignments so they are ready to go whenever I get done with the P and PcP alignments. Although it is very nice and efficient of him to do this, I still feel bad that he has to do what would have been my work and put his own on the back burner because these earthquakes are so complicated and everything keeps going wrong. Also on the bright side, I got some tips from Miaki on how to write an abstract when you don't have any results yet. I better get cracking on that this weekend so I can ask Miaki and Eric for feedback before the deadline. My fingers are still crossed that this is the last thing that goes wrong, but this summer has obeyed Murphy's Law to a T, so I won't hold my breath.   It's my birthday on Monday, and although I will have to work all day, this weekend I have carved out some time to celebrate with friends. I just hope the heat doesn't deter any of our plans. This past week or so I have been way jealous of Caroline B. since she is currently experiencing Australian winter. I could definitely use some relief, as I am sure all of the other interns could too. If I had a couple thousand dollars laying around, I would totally fly to the southern hemisphere. For now, though, I will just stick to the AC on full blast.

2011-07-22T15:17:09-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/finally_moving_on

I have made much progress since my last post, so I think its time to get you all up to date.  After outputting the table of distances, depths, and angles that I discussed last time, I made some very helpful discoveries about how HASH actually calculates the take-off angles.  When you first run the program, it assumes that the earthquake location is unknown so it creates a table with a large range of source depths and source-station distances.  It then does a ray trace for every combination of depth and distance to calculate a take-off angle and populate the rest of the table.  HASH then reads the input files containing the earthquake's actual depth and distance from each station.  The take-off angle for each of the stations is then calculated from the table using double interpolation.  I checked this particular calculation for several stations by hand to make sure that this step was correct and it was. Since the take-off angle calculation was clearly not the issue, I then had the program output some different information - the range and depth at each layer in the velocity model for a single seismic station so that I could plot the actual path of the ray trace.  While I discovered that it always has the ray turn at the mid-point for rays that are initially down-going (which is a fair assumption), I did not find any problems with this calculation either.  After pouring over all of this extensive output for several days by myself, I then looked it over with Monica to see if she saw anything different than I did.  She agreed with my conclusions that the program was doing everything just as it should be.  Therefore, the odd circle effect on the focal mechanisms was simply a manifestation of the large distance and wasn't actually wrong, just ugly.  Because of this, we decided that it would be best not to plot the polarities on the focal mechanisms any more. Sorting out the apparent non-issue gave me the go-ahead to run HASH for all of the data that I had already prepared and to download some more.  Since then I have re-calculated focal mechanisms for the eight events that I had done before trying to debug the program, as well as for an additional six events.  I've downloaded waveforms for even nine more, which will bring my total up to 23 (more than our original goal of 10-15), although I have not gotten to pick the first-motion polarities for those quite yet.  I'm now working my way back in time (already in 2009) so that I will have more seismicity to plot on maps to help determine which offshore faults are active and potentially dangerous. I was also given the task to begin preparing some data and maps for the research cruise in September.  I was finally given the exact locations and depths of the 34 OBSs to work those into the ALBACORE HASH subroutine for when we actually have the data available.  (Which is a whole other story - apparently the Navy needs to look at all of the data the stations have collected before we do to make sure we haven't detected anything we shouldn't have.  This kind of makes me feel like I'm in a James Bond movie...)  I also created a map, below, showing the azimuthal distribution of the M6.0+ earthquakes that have occurred since the OBS deployment; there were a lot because of the Japan earthquake.  The hydrophones on the OBSs should be strong enough to detect those events, so it will be interesting to look at that data someday. I haven't done much of anything exciting outside of work since the midnight showing of HP7P2.  This is partially because I've re-injured my knee working out, but also because its sometimes nice just to relax in my room on the weekends.  However, I am greatly looking forward to this upcoming Monday/Tuesday because I get to do some field work!  I've been invited by the Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS) department at CalTech to participate in their field days.  We're going out to the San Jacinto fault region to download data, remove stations, and prepare them for shipment (probably to PASSCAL).  I'm sure that it will be just about as hot as it was during orientation in New Mexico but it will be a nice chance to get out of the office for a couple days and get some more field experience.

2011-07-21T20:19:40-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/tinkering_on

So once again it has been a pretty productive week. Mostly I have been working on an algorithm to automate location of the tremor I found visually. I have put a lot of time into these scripts and found out that my advisor does not comment his code! This means a lot of my time is spent deciphering through what the code does. I think the most time consuming things is that it always calls specific files, since Mike was the one who formatted it he knows how the columns are organized. I have to pull that file to see how it's formatted to see what is being pulled out of the file. Anyways enough about the deciphering and on to what I have accomplished. So my idea was to iterate over the section of surface waves where my tremor would occur. I have SAC try to cross correlate the envelope function that has been filtered within the 6-10Hz range. This search uses a base station as reference and searches 400s on each side of the interval for peaks similar to the reference station. I wanted to iterate so that I could get a lot of locations that should be in the same region (this turned out to be lot of work), so I could get good average. So that as the basic idea, here is the first attempt of the code trying to locate one event:     I say again, this was supposed to be ONE event. This was not the greatest first attempt. I mean the good news is there is clustering in two different locations, which means there is some promise. I tried a few different things with this code. I tried changing the search from 400s to 100s and everything in between. I also tried changing the iteration value from 25s to 10s all the way down to 5s. None of these adjustments really made a difference, everything still seemed pretty scattered. So I went back to the drawing board. I still felt like I had the right idea of iterating over the tremor event so I stayed with it. I took a closer look and I had lots of locations that were using only 2 stations! I also realized that the cross-correlation value, the ratio of how similar the waves are, was only .5. So for the next attempt I ended up struggling through some code to make sure that I had a correlation value of at least .65 on 4 stations. This new code zoned in the locations! I still had a few locations outside the area of where tremor can occur. So i took a region and decided to throw out all the values outside the box, as they can't actually be locations and then averaged all the points and I have the final location. Here is the new map:         The red box is where I decided (and talked with Mike) that tremor would not occur out of the box. So the green cluster up top would be thrown out when I average the points. This map shows two separate events. The Green stars are the Sumatra locations, the Pink stars are the Japan locations. I need to change the color of the average stars but that easy to fix, these are just for me to visualize everything. Anyways that's what I have been doing here for the week. Lots of coding and I have had a few frustrating days. AWK kicked my butt for a while but I think I am finally starting to get the hang of it. Let me tell you doing math in a c-shell script is not easy. And here in Ohio along with the rest of the Eastern US has been really HOT. It feels like you’re in a steam cooker, literally. The humidity has been up around 70-80% and it has been in the upper 90's. We did have a really cool thunderstorm yesterday though! Anyways in light of the heat bubble of the Midwest and East coast:         IT FEELS LIKE 107!   Keep it cool till next week!        

2011-07-21T15:26:08-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/trials_tribulations_and_the_light_at_the_end_of_the_tunnel

So this past week has been difficult. I've been sick for the last two, and I haven't gotten much opportunity to sit back and enjoy the stuff that's going on, but things are getting better. Here's the update:   I've been falling behind, I guess, without realizing it. There's a lot to do, and I guess I'm not doing it fast enough. So I'm trying to "pick" up the pace (har har puns). I finished the PcP-P events yesterday, all 27, and today I had a big scare, because my script didn't work right. and didn't save my measurements to the right files. I almost had to do everything over again, but with some magic and C Shell I was able to append my table and now I have all 800 measurements neatly organized into a table. Lucky me. My next job is to finish the script I wrote to weed out bad quality measurements and organize them into specific directories. My script is currently in its "almost done just needs some tweaking" phase, and then I'll be good to go. I am also starting to plot my record sections using GMT as well as plotting P and PcP ray paths through a tomographic model. I believe I'll be using Ritsema's script, and that should help immensely. I went to an interesting seminar last week, about the geo dynamo and using ancient volcanic eruptions to show the excursions between pole reversals. It was done by Brad Singer from the University of Wisconsin, and has given me an idea to look into his research and school for Grad School... Also, the talk today was done by Brian Kennett and though it wasn't entirely technical, it was interesting. He was talking a lot about the Boxing day earthquake in 2004 and the Japan earthquake in 2011, and how where the earthquake occurs in subduction zones makes a huge difference in how the earthquake will "act". He explained how the 2004 earthquake sort of acted like falling blocks, how the first quake caused more places along the zone to release their stress and that's partly why it was so destructive. All of this interpretation might be wrong, but that's what I got out of it. I went to this delicious ice cream parlor that's meant to be an American food place that isn't McDonalds and it had hotdogs and ice cream. I got a banana split, and it was delicious. Also, after buying a rice cooker, I am much better off food wise, as a 5$ bag of rice is lasting me a week or so for lunch and dinner. Yum. I am slowly realizing that a month from tomorrow I'll be heading home. I'm missing the states terribly and I'm really excited. Although it's super fun here, I can't wait to be back. I just hope I'll be able to finish everything in time, and I think if I work hard and work some Saturdays I should be fine. I've read 20 books so far this summer, which is more than I've ever had the opportunity to read in such a short time. I do think, however, that I need to read the seismology book instead of my novels, but I'm loving them too much! haha That's all I have for now. Once I start plotting more I'll post some pictures for you all to see Bye!

2011-07-21T06:47:19-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/catching_up

Hello All! I am sorry I have been so distant. I just have been SO busy! I have not had one weekend to sit and relax yet... There are just too many fun things to do in Oregon. My research is going well. The scope of the project has changed a bit. At first we thought the earthquake swarm was due to a magmatic injection but now we think it was caused by transform faulting near the spreading center. By graphing the magnitude of the earthquakes by the frequency of the magnitude I was able to find the slope of the line called the b value. The b value can help determine if the earthquake was due to a magmatic or tectonic process. From my calculated b value the swarm seems to be tectonic, supporting the transform fault hypothesis. The focal mechanism solutions (beach ball diagrams) also look like the largest earthquakes in the swarm were due to a transform faulting. It has been fun trying to discover what the swarm was caused by. Now I am looking at spectrograms of days during the swarm. I might be able to get some information from the frequency content of the earthquakes. I am also going to be measure the instrument response between land seismic stations and ocean bottom seismometers. My weekends have been full of interesting adventures! I went to Portland and Mt. Hood a few weekends ago. The past two weekends I have been spending all my time at the beach in Newport. I have decided that I really want to move near the ocean. I love the Oregon coast. It is so rocky and green and cloudy. It is so beautiful. The town of Newport is a fun little town with cute shops, lots of beaches, and lighthouses. Last weekend my fellow land locked family came to Newport with me to enjoy the ocean. One of the interns for the Oregon State REUs taught my sister and I how to surf! I had so much fun fighting the waves. I hope I get to do it again. I was happy that I accomplished yet another one of my summer goals! I also got to see lots of wildlife. I saw octopus, seals, lots of ocean birds, whales, and tide pools. I am getting ready for my research cruise! We leave on Saturday or Sunday. The purpose of the cruise is to drop ocean bottom seiesmometers off the coast of Oregon and Washington. I am getting excited and nervous for the cruise. I hope I do not get sea sick! I have never gotten sick before on boats... so hopefully I will be alright. I will have internet on the cruise which will be nice. I will definitely update my blog once I am on the ship! Cheers!

2011-07-20T12:45:43-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/not_sure_what_week_it_is

Now for a week ?? update. It's embarassing, but I've lost track of what week of the internship this is. Things have been progressing lately; for the past few days I've been locating events that occured in line with the array. We decided to start with these because they'll be easier to work with later. Our original plan was to look for blasts from the nearby mines, however the events we thought were explosions turned out to be way to slow to be earthquakes or explosions. It's more likely that they are sonic booms from the nearby Fallon Naval Air Station. These events were interesting, but not quite what we were looking for. So for now we are looking at local earthquakes. I haven't done that much stuff besides work the past couple of weeks, although I did make time to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II on Saturday. My childhood is officially over. I'll end with this photo: This weekend there was a festival in Corvallis called Da Vinci Days. One of the events was sidewalk art. This was my favorite. My question for you is: who wins?

2011-07-19T19:40:40-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/still_waiting

Things take a very long time to get through all the security and beaurocracy here, longer than the time it would take an ent to say this sentence.  So I'm still waiting for my data, which hopefully will come in this week. Meanwhile I've been working on my AGU abstract, which I have to finish this week in order to give the NNSA time to review it and give me clearance before I'm allowed to submit it.  I've also been doing a lot more reading; my host gave me 5 geophysics books to look through, two of which are good enough that I've considered buying my own copies. On the exciting side of things, I'm going to get to go out to the test site next week!  I still don't technically count as a whole person (they have this "two man rule" where you need at least two whole people every time you go out to the site) cause of my hand, but since there's already two other people going, I get to come along and take notes for them.  We'll be looking at the geophones I had found problems with back when I QC'd their signals. So, looking back at my goals, I'm doing pretty good on #7 (I'm still in Physical Therapy but making progress), and have making lots of headway on #3.

2011-07-19T17:05:50-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/webinar_communicating_your_research_to_non-science_audiences

A couple weeks ago, we had a webinar that addressed methods of describing your research in ways that are geared toward more general audiences who are not familiar with the jargon or common techniques of your field. After the webinar, we were assigned a task to create a 500 word description of our summer research project that is appropriate for a 15-18 year-old audience. The following paragraph is the desciption I wrote: My research revolves around deep earthquakes. Deep earthquakes are important to research because they reveal pieces of information about the composition, movement, and development of our Earth. For my project, I am analyzing one sequence of three major earthquakes and their aftershocks. There are three main shocks with magnitudes of 7.3, 7.6, and 7.4 that occurred in the same area in the Moro Gulf of the Philippines at depths of 585-640 km. In order to analyze these three earthquakes, I use computer scripts, which are a set of commands and variables for the computer to run that changes the data into a file I can use to visualize the waveforms. The image that I see has a lot of horizontal wavy lines that show me information about the earthquake. Small waves mean small parts of the earthquake, and the large peaks are the strong parts of the earthquake. Typically, deep earthquakes show a flat part, then a sudden series of large peaks before it dies down to smaller peaks. The sudden large peaks mean the earthquake is impulsive. If the size of the peaks grows more gradually, that is, flat then small peaks, then large peaks, then small peaks again, the earthquake is emergent. This set of three earthquakes is emergent, even though deep earthquakes are usually impulsive. This means that these earthquakes are very unique and definitely worth learning about because they could reveal new information about the deep Earth. Once I have this image, I change some of the variables in the computer scripts to make the first wave shift slightly and line up. I align the first waves of the waveforms because the amount of shift necessary to line them up is important in the next step. Once the first waves are aligned for all of the lines, I run more scripts that change the data into maps that show me the coastline, epicenter, which is the point where the earthquake began, and a burst of color that shows the ground motion caused by the earthquake. For each of these maps, I can also create an animation that shows the color from the ground motion move across the screen and show me where the earthquakes are on the map and how they moved during the time period of the earthquake. The animations are called back-projections and they are used to visualize earthquakes. Once I finish the back-projections for the three main events, I will incorporate the aftershock data into the computer scripts and combine all of the animations into one that will show me all of the earthquakes from the Moro Gulf sequence. Hopefully when this is finished, I will identify something about deep earthquakes that is not yet known.    

2011-07-19T12:13:15-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/party_rock_the_project

The delay in this week's post is dude solely to Brady's and my awesome visit to Memphis to Dylan and Ado (and a friend of mine from school, Joe)!!! We left early Saturday morning and drove the 8 hours down to that lovely corner of Tennessee and 'tore it up' with each other for the weekend! It was a fantastic trip - it was great to see Dylan and Ado and it was really nice to get out of Oxford for the weekend as well. As promised, LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem" was our theme song for the weekend, but I'm glad to be back in Oxford and looking forward to getting back to work; this weekend was a great break. But back to my work week - I finally started writing some GMT scripts to map the earthquake locations I've been using Antelope to find. I'm making maps to show the locations from a bird's eye view as well as figuring out how to make cross sections that show distribution by depth as well. 'Awk' is an awesome command and map making is more fun/more complicated than I thought. Other than that, I'm just continuing to make picks and find more hypocenters. That's about everything in a nutshell. I'm planning to try and make my maps a little cooler this week too. Lastly, in terms of my musical entertainment, I went on a little bit of a cheesy euro-kick at the beginning of this week with Inna's "Deja Vu" featuring Bob Taylor (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1U1qyLCWjU). But by Thursday I was back to more 'normal' for me with Madeon's awesome 39 song mashup called "Pop Culture" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTx3G6h2xyA). Hope you all enjoy those and have a great week!

2011-07-18T22:28:51-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/the_pretty_colors_i_promised

Here is one of the 100+ maps I made in GMT of the raw residual data. The scale bar is in seconds, so it implies there is a difference in arrivals of 2+ seconds between some stations. The giant white arrow points toward the event location, which is kind of confusing, but it is what I had for data and I didn't feel like adding 180 degrees. As you can see the station coverage isn't very good and there are some terrible edge effects and other artifacts in this griding method. But the good news is all my results so far are really promising so far. Also due to time constraints it looks like I will not get to put all my data into a tomography model. After I leave my advisor is hoping to do the tomography work and send it to me as he does it. He is also hoping to finish processing the data from end of 2008 through this past June and put that into the tomography as well. Since I posted just a few days ago this is a pretty short entry. But, I will hopefully have another entry later this week with some pictures of the cave I went on the 4th of July as well as some other updates on how my project is coming together.

2011-07-18T16:28:32-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/slowly_but_surely

Good news on the back projection front! The technique of using the aftershock to align the main events increased our resolution to an encouraging threshold last week. I aligned each of the main events from the TA array with the aftershock, and there is more usable information so that feels good! Next I have to incorporate the HINET array by combining the TA and HINET data into what will, hopefully, be the winning combination and show us what we're looking for. Although things have not exactly been ideal on the research front, I am optimistic about where things are headed. I just hope they get crackin' because I would like to liven my abstract up a bit before the deadline on Aug. 4h, which is not only coming up way too fast, but is also a week before my research is supposed to be over! So yeah, I will be keeping my fingers crossed until we reveal some more interesting insights into deep earthquakes.  I took my GRE on Friday and did relatively well. I did about as well as I expected, but a part of me hoped I would rock the socks off that test so I didn't have to worry about it again. I am right on the cusp of deciding wether to take it again or not, I am going to talk to the people who I am interested in working with a bit before I decide to see if they think taking it again would increase my chances of getting into their program. Hopefully they agree and think it is good enough because I really don't want to take it again.  Next monday is my 21st birthday, and my friend Amanda and I are going to spend the day in Providence to celebrate on the 23rd. I am so excited to see her! She is working at Yale this summer and it's always fun to hear what she's up to. I am not even sure what we are going to do in Providence, but I'm sure we'll find something.   I finally managed to take a dip in the Atlantic last weekend. I think I prefer the Pacific, but I don't have any concrete reasoning behind it. I also finally got my tickets to Fenway for a game in a couple weeks and I am so excited to see the park! After my GRE I had my first experience on the Boston subway and learned that everyone who told me it was really easy to get around Boston on their mass transit was correct. You can go just about everywhere! I love things that are convenient.  That's about all of the updates I have this week, I will keep you posted on my progress! 

2011-07-18T09:48:47-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/from_numbers_to_colors

The numbers are in! I have finished processing data from 2005 to 2008 in Alaska. The original goal was to go up to current day (or at least until June when I downloaded data) but due to time constraints of both me and my advisor we decided stopping at 2008 would be a better choice for time and more than enough data anyway. We have something like 2000 events and 23,000 individual arrivals from all the events on all the stations. On Friday we worked together using GMT and shell scripts to plot up the top 100 or so events that had the most stations with picked arrivals. These make pretty rainbow colored plots with an arrow pointing in the direction of where the earthquake occurred (that took some teamwork and some crafty coding to get the arrow to change directions on every plot). We have removed the mean residual from the data so it is just a way to show with raw data if arrivals are early or late. So far it looks really promising! There are some really clear fast areas and slow areas, that seem to be consistent from all directions. The even better news is that is also fits with the previous models of what is there. It is really cool to see some pretty maps finally as a result of weeks of black and white data processing looking only at waveforms. Now I need to make them look “prettier” as my advisor puts it, or in other words make them ready to put into my AGU poster. This will be my task this week since my advisor will be gone all week once again due to field work involving a training session on installing a seismometer. I could have gone with, but I feel like I have too much to get done, and I’ve already installed a seismometer in New Mexico I will provide some example plots sometime later this week since I don’t have any of them available to me while I write this post. As for other visuals….. Regarding requests for pictures of my field work: I don’t have any good pictures of my field work, especially since I didn’t do anything exciting. Really. All I did was: 1. dig a hole 2. pour in cement 3. put a vault in the hole in the cement 4. pour mortar into the vault 5. put the cap and the vault and pour dirt around the vault 6. cover it with a tarp and then put dirt over the tarp The fanciest equipment used was a hand auger and a posthole digger. However here are the cool cliffs I drove past while on the way to the site where we couldn’t dig a hole due to a locked gate. Above is the top part of the cliff where you can see some awesome layers Below (sorry it is so small, it was to large of a file otherwise) is a better show of how tall the cliff is. Look at the telephone poles for reference, they came up to about the top of the the first white cliff face, so the cliff hight was eaily double that.   And just for fun, here is what one site looked like. Not exactly exciting is it? Also I realized that I completely left out the fact that while my parents were here my Dad and I went to a limestone cave created by Karsts landforms in southern Indiana. I’ll need lots of room for pictures of that so it will have to be its own post maybe tomorrow or next week.  

2011-07-16T20:50:01-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/beast_mode

So things are starting to go my way now. On Friday while working with someone else in the Seismic Network, I was finally able to run this Fortran 95 code to calculate the focal mechanism and picture of an earthquake. Now, I just need to test it on a few more earthquakes and POW! The scientific project is finished. Wish me luck. As far as instrumentation goes, I just got all the materials I need to install my own site. I feel like this should have been done a long time ago, but due to some things out of my control, I'm just now about to get to it. Monday is some Puerto Rican Holiday so the technician that's going to help me install it won't be around until Tuesday. On monday I will try to finalize the code for calculating and giving a display for the focal mechanism.

2011-07-16T18:14:13-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/week_6_part_2

Fig. 1. Fig. 2. Using the same program that detected tremor events for the first half of the year 2000 (Fig. 2) I altered it to instead detect earthquakes (Fig. 1). I am still running variations of the program using different parameters because as you can see below, the size of the time window being analyzed, the correlation coefficient required, and the number of stations that must match all greatly alter the count of earthquakes detected. Run 1 The minimum correlation required for an event to be considered an earthquake was raised from 0.6 to 0.8, and the mininum cross-correlation between stations raised to 12 (which means at least 5 stations must record the same event during the time window). The time window was 300s. Run 4 The time window is again 300s and the minimum correlation is still 0.8, but the minimum cross-correlation has been raised to 15-- so at least 6 stations need to fully agree. Note that on day 51 (the day with the most detected tremor), the number of earthquakes is at a maximum as well (25 and 23 events). Run 2 The same parameters as Run 1, but the time window has been shortened to 180s. Run 5 The same parameters as Run 4, but the time window has been shortened to 180s. Note that on day 51, the number of earthquakes detected is again at a maximum, but this time it is 58 and 55 detected events. Run 3 Same as Run 1 and Run 2, but the time window is 120s. Run 6 Same as Run 4 and Run 5, but the time window is 120s. Once more, on day 51, the number of earthquakes detected is again at a maximum, but this time it is at the highest with 79 and 74 detected events.

2011-07-16T17:22:04-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/week_6_part_1

It took a lot of debugging to unearth all the differences in the SAC files between the OBS data and the land data. Lian had to patiently show me how to edit the headers on SAC files before I could get the data read into matlab properly. Once it was read in, the data is trickier to analyze than land data because there is so much more noise. I did ran the data through Matlab three times for only the first 12 days in 2000. I was only looking at the vertical component of the OBS data, when I compare the OBS data to the land data I will have to use the horizontal component to maintain consistency with what was done with the land stations. The three runs were as follows: Run 1 The high frequency correlation needed to detect if it is an earthquake (and therefore should be thrown out) was increased from 0.6 to 0.8. The plots produced by this are below. Again, the latitude and longitude are given on the axes, while the color bar signifies the Julian Day. As you can see, not much tremor was detected. Run 2 The high frequency correlation was increased again to bring it up to 0.9. This resulted in much more "tremor" being detected...Which brings into question what is tremor and what are really just small earthquakes. Run 3 This time the minimum correlation required to detect something as tremor was raised from 0.5 to 0.8, while the necessary high frequency correlation stayed at 0.9. This resulted in the detection of very few tremor events. I will have to discuss it with Dr. Schwartz to decide what set of parameters makes the most sense.

2011-07-16T17:07:10-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/busy_busy_weeks

WARNING! THIS IS LONG AND MAY BORE YOU! but it needed to be done These last couple weeks have consisted of very fast progress on some complicated areas, the result of which have been 50 hr work weeks. Don't get me wrong! I'm enjoying all of the things I am doing, and the fast pace at which I am required to learn GMT along with editing fortran and compiling text files in order to run my professor's code give me a lot of motivation to make progress. But...after long days in the office, the last thing I want to do is post to my blog, and since I am feeling motivated and had a relatively light day today (discussing backprojection, forward modeling, and tomography with my professor from 9am to 5pm today) I feel like I can finally fill you in on my project for the last couple weeks. The bulk of the week before last was spent on refining my first arrival picks from active sources from 12 sources over ~500 receivers in the Salton Trough on a line which runs through recent volcanics (10,000 years old) and geothermally active areas where the heat flow is high enough for this area to be the second most producing geothermal field in the country (Interestingly, the heat flow in these fields is the highest in the country, but is not as developed as the 1st most producing field located in California). Refining these picks consisted of checking reciprocal travel times from shots to receivers near other shots, and vice versa and checking to makes sure the picks between the two shot gathers were consistent. This was a very tedious and difficult task, especially at long offsets, where the magnitude of the signal from the shot is near equal to the background noise of the receiver. These adjusted picks were used to make an updated version of the MATLAB figure seen in my last post, and create a 1D velocity model for the Salton trough sediments. After this, I spent some time putting my shot information, travel time arrivals picks, and receiver information into files that could be easily read into Dr. Hole's tomography codes. It was relatively brainless work, which was a nice break, but took time. I also had to rotate my line from the array and define a new, smaller coordinate system for locating shots and receivers by converting eastings and northings to x and y. This was not too hard, but was a confusing issue at first. The goal is to make as small a box as possible to encompass the shots and receivers used to make a 3D tomography model later on. A new map was made from the new coordinates, and thus started my crash course in GMT. Thanks to Rob's helpful notes (and the simplicity of my map), it was not too hard to make. This last week was spend organized my large mass of new files into organized folders that could be easily placed in the codes I will be using to get a tomography model, and the goals for today and tomorrow are to get the various codes to run tomography models and be able to look at them in GMT. We have a lot more trouble shooting of codes coming up, but will finally be able to start producing tomography models! YAY! Only three more weeks till the abstract for AGU is due! (and my prof is letting us all know it!)

2011-07-14T19:45:37-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/false_alarm_

In my last post, I mentioned that I thought I had the "mysterious circle issue" figured out.  The plot I made of source-station distance vs. take-off angle suggested that limiting the range would provide enough data with a variety of take-off angles to successfully compute focal mechanisms.  So after limiting the range and running the program for all of the events that I have first motion polarities for, its giving me the same problem as before.  Even worse, its barely using data from enough stations to compute a focal mechanism at all and when it does, its giving me awful errors.  Here's an example of what I'm talking about: This particular focal mechanism was created using my average velocity model for a M3.69 event that occurred on 2011/05/21.  I have plotted the polarities from various stations on the "beach ball" - where a circle is a negative polarity and a plus is a positive polarity - according to their azimuth and take-off angle.  Since the program calculated nearly identical TOAs for most of the stations, they form a circle (especially on the upper right-hand side).  This solution gave me a fault plane uncertainty of 49 degrees and a mechanism probability of only 43%.  You can tell that the fit is terrible just by looking at it, since the negative polarities are supposed to fall in the white quadrants and the positive polarities in the blue quadrants. Now, I'm going back to look at the code some more to make sure that it is properly computing the take-off angles.  I'm having the program output a table of distances, depths, and angles from the P-wave ray trace to my screen so that I can plot these numbers.  Hopefully this will allow me to see a graph of the path the rays are taking through the earth and determine if it looks realistic.  If the waves are not behaving as expected, I may have to alter either the velocity models or the code for the calculation.  I guess I'll have to wait and see where this takes me.

2011-07-14T16:03:09-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/forward_modeling_and_making_friends_with_gmt

I finished creating reciever functions for the Ryukyu arc stations last week. I ended up with eight in the end because one of the last stations I was working on was shut down in 2004 and therefore didnt have enough events to make a good receiver function. I started playing around with the forward modeling code last week as well. To do this we make a model file that looks something like this: # Layers: crust, anisotropic wedge, isotropic half-space. #thick    rho      alph    beta   iso   %P  %S    tr     pl  st   di 40000   3200   7200   4100   1      0      0      0     0   0    0 20000   2550   5500   3200   0      9      9      0     0   0    25 30000   3000   7000   3950   1      0      0      0     0   0    0 0           3300   8200   4700   1      0      0      0     0   0    0   This is just a sample but the idea is to create a model of the layers in the subduction zone with the correct thickness, velocities, aniosotropy, strike, dip ect so that the synthetic receiver function created from the model has the same major features as the one that was made from the data. The model above gives you a receiver function that looks like... As you can see it would be impossible to match every feature you see with this model but the idea is the replicate the major ones.   I have also been writing my first GMT script this week. Starting it was a bit of a struggle but Rob's tutorial and the one online were very helpful. And of course Erin helped me work out some of the kinks once it was up and running Just finished this guy a few hours ago (still slightly shocked that everything did what it was suppose to)   This is the lovely Ryukyu Arc in southern Japan. The red triangles are all of the stations. The contour lines are slab depth. The solid black line is 6km depth and the dashed ones are 50km, 100km ect. Finally wandered into the Peabody museum yesterday (my parents were in town). It is pretty amazing the variety of what they have there. Also, we have our last softball game today. wish us luck!

2011-07-14T15:07:22-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/wait...what_week_is_it

I was supposed to go to Caja de Muertos this past Monday. I was ready at 5:30 a.m. and everything. Drove an hour and a half to the boat that would take me to the island. This is attempt #4 by the way. We arrive at the port, and there is no boat to be found. We wait a while. Still no boat. We go to the port's office and ask, "¿Dónde está el barco?" That's "Where's the friggin boat?" in Spanish for all you non Spanish speakers out there. The office called the guy's cell phone and house phone. There was no response. Grreeeaattt....(sarcasm). Attempt #4 = FAIL! And this fail is worse than the first 3 fails! Attempt #5 was rescheduled for this past Wednesday...then this Friday... now it's inconclusive as to when I will go to work on this seismic station. So on Wednesday, I made a budget for the seismic station & sand insulation that I am going to do myself. It's to see if it can cancel out more noise than traditional insulation. I gave the budget to the head of PRSN (Puerto Rican Seismic Network). My task was to pull some earthquakes out of PRSN's database and see if I could calculate the first motions by hand before running it through the code I have to make sure that it's right. The database went down that day. The database is down today. The head analyst that is supposed to get it back up and running said he's too busy to help me until Monday. The other analysts don;t know how to fix it and the head of PRSN has left town again at least for today.  As of right now, I can't do the field work side of my project nor the programming portion. I'm kind of at a stand still. Guess I'll read up on some papers and some programming stuff for the remainder of my day.  

2011-07-14T10:06:32-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/progress

So far I have been doing a lot of reading and preparing for my data.  I have been reading about the CTBT, and the geology of the test site.  I have also gotten some software to play with.  Since it is taking Matlab forever to get through security (over a month) I have been given one of Cathy's colleagues programs to help me choose first arrival times.  Then I will be using MacR1D and MacRay (the 2D version) to forward model the velocity structure and see if it matches with the travel time plot.  So far I still don't have the SPE data I need, but they are working on getting it into SEG-Y format so that I can open it.  I've been pretty successful at playing with the sample data, though, and I have figured out how to convert it from one program to the other.

2011-07-13T22:16:42-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/pictures_from_my_work-stuff

This is the map of events. The red stars indicate all of the events from 2001-2009 that satisfy my criteria of occurring <80km and have at least a 5.8 body magnitude. The blue stars are the events previously done by Hrvoje prior to 2001 which satisfy my criteria and the yellow stars are Hrvoje's events that do not. The Green diamonds are the events I chose to do. In total, there are 27 of them. The next picture is a map of the stations of my best event thus far. It took place in the Mediterranean. The stations are marked as green triangles and the reflection points are marked with circles or triangles, depending on the residual. The residual is calculated by subracting the predicted PcP-P from the observed PcP-P. If a residual is negative, it means that the PcP wave was fast or the P wave was slow, and if it is positive, it means that the PcP was slow or the P wave was fast. Woo GMT!   Here's the revised picture, I took Rob's advice to change the color of the symbols. I intend on comparing it to the tomographic model when I finish my measurements.

2011-07-13T18:15:37-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/week_5_week_6_part_1

The trials and trevails of computers. Between running out of disk space and debugging codes, things have run slower than prefered. This week I have been getting results, so stay updated for the end of the week when I have more interesting things to share regarding the detection of tremor via OBS stations, as well as the detection of earthquakes.

2011-07-13T11:16:36-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/chuggin_along

Hey all, I spent the last week working with a smaller event (a M5.7 aftershock) from the TA array in attempt to align the three larger earthquakes with this one and resolve all of the array and network issues I have been having for the past month or so. I just finished back projecting the aftershock-mainshock alignments and they still smear in the same direction as the HINET array, which as I recall was the original issue. I have yet to discuss this with Eric, as I will do this afternoon, but I am really hoping this miraculously works because not only am I behind schedule, but also incredibly sick of doing the same thing over and over and over. I could use a little something to spice up my life a bit. The positive thing is that the new back projections are better than the original TA animations, but I am not quite sure if they are usable yet. I am having lunch with Miaki and the group tomorrow, and it would be great to have something positive to report, rather than the same old thing. Fingers crossed. Below is my latest screen shot - at least I work with pretty colors to keep myself from going nuts. This is the only reason a 27" screen is useful - to open a whole bunch of windows and be able to see all of them!  I don't really have much else to report. I am taking the GRE on Friday, so studying for that has been monopolizing my free time. I convinced myself that once it was over I could relax, but reality has set in and I realize that I have registration, grad school contacts, and a lot of other logistic responsibilities before I can take it easy. I guess I should be used to that by now, but I just have to take it one step at a time. Since I am keeping so busy, this summer is flying by! I can't believe it is the middle of July already and that I will be back at school in 6 weeks. Honestly, it will be good for my life to regulate itself again. I have been bouncing around all over the place this summer, which has been sweet, but it is always nice to go back to San Diego and have things calm down a bit.   I will (hopefully) have good news and new things to post about next time. Until then...

2011-07-13T10:36:17-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/set-backs_or_progress

I got a lot of work done while my advisor was on vacation, but things have unfortunately slowed down since then. I downloaded the waveform data from the SCEDC website for ten events with a local magnitude greater than three that have occurred since the OBSs were deployed last summer. I was able to successfully pick the first-motion polarities for seven of those ten events. The other three events had a magnitude very close to 3.0 and their signal-to-noise ratio was absolutely atrocious, so it was nearly impossible to distinguish the signal from the noise. I also picked polarities for a couple of the larger earthquakes from the previous year. With all of that data formatted, organized, and ready for use, I had to finally make a decision about which velocity model(s) to use with HASH. I ran the program with all of the standard inputs except for the maximum source-station distance, which I increased to accommodate for the fact that my offshore sources are quite far from most of the onshore stations. I then recorded and compared the error outputs for all of the velocity models. I had to re-read the user manual and the academic paper about the computer program to actually understand what the various error sources were telling me, but finally managed to properly interpret it. It became quite clear that the RMS fault plane uncertainty and mechanism probability were the best outputs to look at as they give a quantitative measurement of the fit of the data and the constraint of the focal mechanism solution. I then created my own velocity model based on the other velocity models that yielded the best results and probable Moho depth for the Borderlands region. I called this file "vz.average" (creative, I know) and ran the program for the Santa Barbara event using this as an input. I was quite surprised to find that it yielded great results - nine degrees of fault plane uncertainty and 100% mechanism probability. Although these results were not replicated for the other events that I had data for, it still gave better output than most of the other velocity models. But after plotting the polarities on the focal mechanisms produced, I realized that something was not right. The polarities were forming a perfect circle on the focal mechanism. This indicated that the program was calculating the exact same take-off angle for many of the stations, which would not normally happen. I worked on this problem all day today and I think I might have gotten it all sorted out. Monica suggested that I plot source-station distance versus take-off angle to see if there is a correlation. After doing this for several velocity models for one event, I discovered that there was. The program was calculating nearly identical take-off angles for stations with a greater range because the P-wave velocity varies very little at greater depths. So in increasing the search radius earlier on to use as much data as possible, I was actually skewing my results. After limiting the radius based on the plot that I made, the mysterious circle issue seems to be resolved. Hopefully, this means that I have finally sorted out all of the kinks with HASH and I can just start cranking out focal mechanisms. During the extended Fourth of July weekend, I thankfully got to take a much needed break from my computer screen. My parents and I went up to Santa Barbara for some shopping, beach time, and surfing. Every new place I visit in California is more beautiful than the last and SB was certainly not an exception. I really enjoyed getting to relax at the beach and finally go surfing in the Pacific Ocean! I also loved getting to see my parents for the first time in over a month, although it made me miss home more than I thought it would. This past weekend I went to the beach in Malibu with a couple of friends. It was quite cold out, but there was a swell so it was cool getting to watch the surfers that are much braver than I am out on the big waves. Now I'm looking forward to the midnight premier of the final Harry Potter movie on Thursday night, although it will be sad saying goodbye to the characters that were such a huge part of my childhood and teenage years.

2011-07-12T21:22:17-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/kind_of_a_long_post

It has come time for me to report back on my last two weeks since my post last week was really quickly typed up (with no spell check, sorry about all the mistakes). My week before 4th of July weekend consisted of me processing more data while my professor went out and did some field work. While he was gone I worked hard to process data. Unfortunately I was thinking very clearly and made a huge mistake that I didn’t know how to fix on Tuesday afternoon. Luckily after about an hour of thinking followed by another hour of trial and error, I figured out how to fix it all by myself! My Professor came back on Wednesday evening and we did the IRIS review sheet thing and he told me he was proud I was able to solve the problem all on my own. In the end I did lose about one days worth of work though. My family arrived in town late Wednesday night. I took half of Friday off and went with them to finally wander the downtown shopping of Bloomington, IN. There is some really fun stuff here and I will have to go back again I think. We also drove up to Indianapolis and visited the zoo as well as the NCAA museum. It was fun going to the museum because they had a picture of my school’s mascot (go Michigan Tech Huskies!) and it was the only picture where the mascot was wearing hockey skates. So appropriate! We also fit in some more shopping, some minigolf (despite a heat index of 110) and lots of good food. My family left on Tuesday morning while I left for field work in Southern Illinois digging holes. The field team consisted of me, one IU grad student, and two other geology undergrads from Purdue. We worked out of Carbondale, Illinois and I got a real good look at lots of corn and soybean fields and lots of dirt. I have also never sweated so much in my life! But the work wasn’t too bad. I spent a lot of time at McDonalds while I was there because it had free wifi. On my last day down there one of the guys from Purdue and I were sent to a site really far west border of Illinois. Unfortunately we couldn’t reach the owners and the gate to the property was closed, so we couldn’t dig a hole, but the drive was gorgeous. We drove past some huge gorgeous limestone cliffs. The best part was that the cliffs had mines in them that really cold air came gushing out of. It was like driving past giant refrigerators and it felt wonderful! The cliffs were on the edge of the Mississippi flood plain, which was still mostly flooded. I was so awesome seeing the huge flood plain compared to the size of the Mississippi I am used to in Minnesota. I got back from field work Saturday afternoon and went to my professor’s house for a party celebrating one of the grad student’s defenses he had done that week. It was pretty fun and dessert was delicious. I am back to processing data now as well as beginning to look at the tomography code. The tomography code seems like a challenge to work with, but do did the data processing at the beginning and that’s easy stuff now. I’m hopeful I can lean it and get a good model out of it in the next few weeks. Well I think I’ve typed enough for two weeks now, and my fingers are getting tired. Also my internet died at my apartment, so all my internet time had to be done either at my internship or somewhere with free wifi (I’m at Barns & Noble right now, I’m sick of Mcdonalds). Hopefully I can get the internet at my apartment fixed by this weekend. Who knew modems could be so tricky?  

2011-07-12T19:25:08-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/making_progress

This week has been a very productive week for me here in Oxford. At the beginning of the week Mike gave me a couple of scripts for a new way to look at the data. I say a new way because I have already gone through all the big events (Mw>7.9) over the past 10 years or so and visually looked for triggered tremor on various stations in Alaska. I used the code I had written to filter through the data and plot it in a spectrogram. This new code does a lot more! I have to work it remotely on one of the servers here at Miami U, which means lots of terminal work, and a lot of linux/unix commands and shell scripting, which lucky for me I find actually rather fun. This being the case I made my new work area a little better by buying a cable and making dual monitors: Thats my girlfriend and I in San Diego right before I left The new code takes the .seed file that I download from IRIS and extracts it. This extraction is a lot more complex that what I was doing before. It looks through the header files and only pulls out an hour of data, since I am only looking at when the surface waves arrive, and then it does a deconvolution. This deconvolution is based off of information in the header file, and it is necessary to filter out the response of the station to the ground movement to make sure I am only looking at earth movement not station movement. After it extracts and does the deconvolution it also creates a seismic envelope, which in a nutshell takes the absolute value of the seismogram, making it all positive make the new seismogram look like an envelope instead of a seismogram. The benefit of this is that tremor shows up as kind of a elongated bump, a raise in overall amplitude and a gradual fall of amplitude if that makes sense. After I extract all of the data and deconvolute it, I run another code, this one is a little over my head still (and still needs work), but this code is the important code. The code essentially gets SAC to compare waveforms. It compares all the stations for similarities and saves them as a ratio file. The ratio file is an ASCII file that plots the values of two different frequency bands: 6-10Hz (tremor!), greater than 6Hz (earthquake band). It also plots the values of the original envelope function and also the values of the tremor band vs the earthquake band. This of course is all made possible by using the fancy command/language (not sure which) AWK. This comparison is the part of the program that still needs work. I am hoping to improve on it before the summer is out. The main problem It doesn't correlate the stations properly. This more than likely has to do with the fact that I am in Alaska and don’t have a dense array of seismometers and because the subduction zone in the Aleutians is so active there are always little earthquakes going off. I have also plotted the stations on Google Earth and found that there are a few that are right of main roads and once that is less than a half km away from a train station! Unfortunately in order to fix this problem need more understanding in how SAC correlates the waveforms. It correlates stations that are 6-7 degrees apart, that’s like half of Alaska! In these columns of the correlated waveforms are the values of the envelopes. After these ratio files are made, of what the computer thinks tremor looks like I plot the bands using GMT. I plot the original envelope, the earthquake band, the tremor band and the ratio of the two. If it is tremor the ratio of the bands should be really high because that means there is more energy in the tremor band (6-10Hz) than the earthquake band (>6Hz). This new method is time consuming as it takes SAC a few hours to compare all the stations, but it does work pretty well. After I visually go through these plots of the ratios I try to correlate the stations using one more code. This code actually tries to locate the tremor. I need to talk to Mike about it alittle more but essentially to locate tremor you need to match peaks in the waveform itself as defined P-S waves are not there. This program I pick a time and SAC once again tries to cross correlate the selected stations and then spits out a location with errors. This is the part I talk briefly about on Thursday, but I still need some more understanding. It's hard to see, but the different colors are supposed to be the same location. Each color was when I used the same station for reference but a slightly different time. I was playing around with the script that cross-correlates the data and as you can see by picking various times and different stations for reference I get dramatically different results.   Well that was what I did for work this week, as the title suggests it’s been an extremely productive week. On a tangent, I did get to go out with two people who are working for Earthscope and help them pick out a suitable location for a seismometer site for when the transportable array arrives in Ohio. We looked at three local sites, two of which were way to close to main roads as you could still hear traffic. The last site ended up being on some land owned by the university where they do Ecology research. It was a suitable spot as we found a field that was a away from trees (Hard to do in Ohio!) and that had decent satellite signal. I didn’t realize how much paperwork needed to be done in order to approve this site. It involved taking GPS reading (DUH) and lots of pictures; pictures from the site, Google Earth, Topography, and even photos on the road to get there so that when Earthscope goes to put in the seismometer they can find it. That was probably my fieldwork for the summer so I though I should mention it. I have also been working on the project to explain my research to a non-scientific audience. This is actually a little more challenging than I though it would be. I of course did a powerpoint because I feel that pictures are absolutely necessary to explain what I have been doing. Also in the process I messed around with GMT more, finding out this program, despite the hard learning curve, is extremely powerful and awesome. I made all the figures in my PowerPoint using it and Rob Porrit was right, GMT plots do look nice :D.   On the fun side of things Martin and I kicked ass at volleyball the other night and we went the National USAF museum, which was awesome! My favorite plane by far was the SR-71. We also discovered that there is a lake about 7 miles north of here with all kinds of things to do. They have a beach, paintball, mountain biking, and boat rentals, putt putt golf, horse rentals and riding, and a golf course (rated 4.5stars by golf digest). Just so you know it took 4 days to get from Reno to Oxford in a car. This plane cruises at 80,000+ feet at 2,000+mph. That means it could go from Reno to Oxford in a little under an hour! Thats the ride I want :D. Anyways till next week!  

2011-07-12T18:18:25-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/finally_some_research_and_some_goals

Last week was my first week back in the lab after fieldwork in Nevada. Adjusting to labwork is not going as smoothly as I'd like. After 2 weeks of summer vacation, orientation and 2 1/2 weeks of fieldwork my brain wasn't in research mode. Reading papers was a struggle, and looking at the data wasn't any better. At the end of the week I started looking at some of the data from Nevada. Friday was my first forray into picking. Some of the other interns have been doing this for a while already, but this was my first time. Needless to say it was very confusing. I left the lab on Friday afternoon feeling very discouraged. But then I remembered an article that we read in one of my science classes in high school. The details are fuzzy, but to put it bluntly the main point was: scientific research is hard, it even makes smart people feel stupid. Yesterday I spent the day picking as well, and it went a lot better. I have a feeling that I'm going to do a lot of picking, so hopefully in a little while I'll be a pro. In other news, I finally made it out to the coast last weekend. Paige, some oceanography REU students and myself went to Newport for the weekend. The beach was really relaxing, and we got to see some cool stuff like harbor seals and tide pools. I also finally got a gym pass. I've already visited the climbing wall twice. Hopefully I'll have a chance to get on some real rocks this summer. Now that I'm finally starting my research I figure I should set some goals: 1. Learn more about normal faulting, earthquakes and Basin and Range Geology. 2. Become more comfortable with UNIX, Matlab and/or other computer programs/languages I use. 3. Become more comfortable discussing my research with the general public as well as those with background knowledge. 4. Ask for help when I need it. 5. Set a schedule for myself so that I can get enough work done, get exercise, sleep etc. I also have some non research related goals for this summer: 1. Cook something other than pasta, rice or quinoa. 2. Learn how to do pull-ups. 3.Climb South Sister. 4.Explore Oregon.

2011-07-12T12:29:01-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/week_5

This week was a little shorter than the rest. 4th of July fell on this past Monday so everyone had the day off. There wasn't too much happening on my side of the town so I hung out with some of the friends I have made out here and had another day to relax. The rest of the week was spent trying to make sense of a code to help me calculate focal mechanisms. I and the Professor that I work under were both stumped so we have to wait until the following week to ask the guy that we got it from to make sense of it all and how to run it. I went out to a seismic site to help the technicians install a new antenna onto an already installed seismic sensor. The crazy thing was that all this vegetation had grown over the entire site so we had to use machetes to hack away at the plants that had overgrown it. The installation was the most enjoyable part of any of the work I have done out here thus far.  Friday I was supposed to go to a seismic site and work on a new insulation technique based on the New Low & High Noise models, but that was cancelled due to rain. Not a super productive week, but I am still headed in the right direction! The Professor that I work under said that the bulk of my work starts the following week. I hope that he is right because I feel like my entire project has been moving rather slowly. Can't wait for it to pick up the pace!

2011-07-11T09:18:14-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/extra_extra_3_field_trip_in_pictures

  And now we wait for DATA!

2011-07-10T23:27:06-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/week_2_perseverance_and_persistence_the_poem

Week 2 started off with a blast; A great big thunderstorm came upon us fast. It was just our luck that on Monday We had planned a mock infrasound array. Half an hour before we were done The clouds started covering up the sun. The sky started to roar, then rumble, then CRASH!   The lightning and thunder were upon us at last. We rushed and ran to get things set up, And finally it was ready before time was up.  We watched the monitor with each rumble and roar; The sky was a show with big noises galore! An instrument or 2 still needed to be tweaked Before we set up the real thing the next week.   The hard work was to continue on Tuesday With my second Fourier Transform lesson for our array. I realised that with each explanation I started to understand Fourier computation. The rest of the day was spent with the instruments For me to learn how they worked, and to become competent. It was going to be my job to put it all together When we went out into the field, no matter what the weather.   On Wednesday I was introduced To another professor, part of our group. He was our connection to the people in the field Where our infrasound array, the results it would yield. I always forget that professors are human too And have different personalities just like me and you. I found that some are harder to get along with than others But unfortunately we’ve got to make do with one another.   Thursday was going to be an interesting day ‘Cause my prof was going to give a talk on our infrasound array. I learnt the history, what got my prof interested In infrasound in general, and topics that were associated. I also learnt that math was a big part of his life; Funny, because for me, it only causes more strife. Speaking of the devil, after the talk we had another lesson The last part of Fourier Transforms, and now I actually kind of understood the abomination. Transforms are not that hard, but a tad bit complicated Especially for someone for whom math she absolutely hated.   Friday was the last day, building up the excitement, Preparing for our field trip, listing things that might be salient. Our setting up of this array could not be rehearsed And if we made a mistake, it could not be reversed. I had to prepare myself for the worst case scenario And make sure we could handle it, no matter what the situation might bestow. At the end of this week, all I could do was wait To see what next week, the kind of chaos it would create.  

2011-07-10T21:24:15-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/extra_extra_2_a_picture_tour

  Welcome to University of Memphis, Tennessee! I'm schooling at CERI, short form for Center For Earthquake Research and Information! The CERI layout consists of 5 buildings, labelled House 0 to 4. The buildings were originally red-brick homes, and have since been transformed into offices My office cubicle is in the Grad Student Building, House 4.   My cubicle has been nicely labelled with my name by the very nice office staff Following the advice of our awesome mentors during Orientation Week, I have my Daily goals and Weekly goals  always listed. In efforts to keep myself organized, I put up my research information on my wall.   When we have nothing to do (mostly break time during lunch), Dylan and I draw and make origami. I found out that Dylan did not know how to draw hearts, so I took it upon myself to teach him.   When the day is done, I walk back to the student apartments through campus. If it's really late, I get to see the sunset   Thanks for sticking around for this 'virtual' tour of a day in the life of Ado!      

2011-07-10T21:19:41-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/moving_right_along

This week was more of the same in terms of picking waves, but instead of taking time to make the most accurate pick possible for both P and S waves at each station Mike had me switch it up to make precise P picks but generalize the S picks more to speed up the time it takes for me to go through each event.  I was at event 70 on Wednesday and by Friday had gotten to 201! Also, I found out that instead of going through all 2000 events like I thought I would have to, Mike thinks only 500-600 will be a sufficient number of events for my project (an awesome discovery as well). Hopefully I can get through that this week so I can start mapping the locations! On Thursday, we had our first IRIS webinar! It was about communicating research with non-scientific audiences - quite interesting and very informative. I wasn't very excited about the 'homework' we were assigned but I think it will be a really good thing for me to do and for me to practice. Mike is also in charge of finding sites for the US Transportable Array when it comes to Ohio, so on Friday Martin, Brady and I got to accompany Mike and the two people from EarthScope who try and find sites all over the state around Oxford. I got a tiny bit of firsthand experience of what it's like to locate a good site for a seismometer and I learned that Miami U has 1000 acres of nature preserve areas that you can go running and walking in! I'll have to check that out at some point too. In terms of fun, this was my first 4th of July not spent with my family and my cousins! So sad! But Brady and I drove to Indiana and got some fireworks to set off (always excellent - the warehouse we went to was ENORMOUS) and the two of us and Martin went and watched Oxford's fireworks show on the 3rd. It was a good show and the echo from the fireworks in the surrounding hills was awesome! Also the most patriotic show I'd ever been to... they played the national anthem before and what I'll call 'America-is-awesome' music throughout the whole thing (in case you were wondering, they definitely don't do that in Tahoe City, CA or Portland, Oregon where I've spent all previous 4ths). Today we went to the National Museum of the United States Airforce which wase AWESOME. I LOVE airplanes and they had planes from the earliest days of aviation through each of the wars the US has participated in all the way up to much of today's aircraft including space travel and missles. SO COOL. I had a great time! And on the way back we discovered a treasure trove of outdoor activites (biking, boating, archery, paintball, swimming, hiking, mini golf kind of, etc) at a state park just a few miles north of Oxford. All in all, a very good day (: Anyway, I'll leave you all with my song for the week: "From the Music" by the Potbelleez (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22AvQEZ7Eh8). It's upbeat and that's key in making arrival picks... and it keeps saying "never going to get too far away from the music" - probably true. I debated making LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ6zr6kCPj8) this week's selection, but since Brady and I played it all day when we were alone in the lab on Thursday and made it the theme song of our upcoming roadtrip to Memphis (to see Dylan and Ado!!!), I decided to give it an honorable mention this week. Maybe it'll turn up in a later post... And on that note, I'm out for now. Later!  

2011-07-09T22:52:56-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/week_33

The tremor activity for the first six months of 2000 has been counted! Now, I am going to also be looking at what the ocean bottom stations (OBS) recorded, as well as double check the significant events on Antelope. Soon I hope to also start working on Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) software to create better maps of the tremor activity.  In the mean time, I've been soaking up sunshine on runs and chillin' under the clouds at the Monterey Bay Blues Festival. 

2011-07-09T13:28:17-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/week_ending_july_8th

So this week has been productive and good. I've been kind of sick from my trip to Sydney, but I have been getting a lot done. After finishing four events looking at PcP, I used a neat C Shell script I wrote to automatically write out my table of measurements. I then used awk printf to align everything right so that the table looks neat . I know that isn't exactly important, but I guess it just allows me to be proud of it when I print it out. I then wrote a little bit of a rough draft of an "abstract" for my project. I did it so that I could practice talking about my project so that I could actually say I know what it is I'm doing, and Hrvoje also wanted a sample of my scientific writing for the rubric thing. It seems okay, it definitely needs work and expansion, but I think that it is a good start. It's posted as my "profile" project description, just in case any of you want to give me any tips So now that it's Friday I'm pretty worn out from the week. I need to finish my 5th event today and maybe a sixth, but so far I'm procrastinating. I'm exhausted, despite going to bed at 9pm. On a very happy note, I got a care package from my family which included the essentials, like ramen, easy mac, and some shampoo and conditioner. However, they also included some tiny boxes of cereal and my favorite flavor of oatmeal It was definitely the best thing I've come home to since coming here! So Harry Potter is coming out on July 13 at 12:01 AM, and I'm wondering really which day that is. Because obviously. technically, that will be like Tuesday night, but it might not be... meh... I'm confused. I'm going to ask somebody I think haha. So another note on the project, my first event showed decent PcP, my second event showed excellent PcP, my third event was okay, but the fourth event showed nothing. So I'm hoping the 5th will yield better results and that I will find the 10-15 events necessary to have a successful project. Out of the 27 I chose to look at, I'm hoping that at least 10 turn out decent, but I would be happy to see 15 of them. So far I'm thinking that 3/4 events have been good, so hopefully the trend will continue! So that's about all I have I'll post more when I know more.

2011-07-07T18:34:41-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/the_last_days

Yup, unfortunately, all good field work must come to an end. The last five days of our research cruise, however, were a pretty awesome way for it to come to a close. So, before I forget, I wanted to recount my last days on the M/V Strong. Friday, June 24th – We had planned to start our acquisition late this morning because there was a lot of maintenance to perform on the research equipment. The airgun had started leaking a little the day before, which indicated that one or more O-rings were wearing out and needed to be replaced. Also, the big compressor had since surpassed the 50-hour mark indicating its mandatory, although conservative, oil change. While Steffen and the other researchers went to work completely deconstructing the airgun, Steffen put me in charge of changing the oil in the big compressor. I, sufficed to say, was very excited about this. Putting aside my mild disappointment that I would not get to see the airgun dismantled, I asked Kirk for assistance and we went to work. Steffen ran the compressor for a few minutes to warm up the oil, so that it would drain faster (another little trick that I will remember), then I strapped the drain hose to the bucket so that it would drain and I could go about performing other tasks. Kirk and I modified a funnel to include a long drain tube so that it could reach the input. The best thing about this funnel, though, was the fact that it had a cutoff valve and measurements, which allowed us to accurately determine how much oil we had put into the engine. At that point, it was just a matter of putting in 1.25 gallons of the new oil, wiping everything down, and putting the tools away. The entire operation went so smoothly; only a couple of ounces of dirty oil was spilled out of the drain tube. It was a supremely satisfying experience. By the time everything was cleaned up from the oil change, the airgun was back together and we went straight to work reattaching it to the umbilical and the bouy. We were a well oiled machine (hehe). While Steffen and Beatrice were attaching the connectors, Lei Guo was attaching the shackles and I was securing them with seizing wire. We had the entire rig together and in the water in ten minutes. After confirming that the airgun was no longer leaking, the rest of the equipment went in and we were on our way. The rest of the day went off without a hitch. Saturday, June 25th – I’m not sure that anything remarkable happened on Saturday…oh wait…we flawlessly acquired 13 miles of seismic data along the Mississippi River. That’s pretty cool. Sunday, June 26th – This marked the last day of our seismic survey on the river, south of Memphis. We still had two days on the boat, starting on the 28th, performing a survey right around Memphis. We only had 10 miles left to survey (5 hours worth), so, if we started at 8, we would be done by 1 and on the road by 2:30ish, right? Wrong. When testing the airgun, we discovered that it was leaking air very badly. So, we pull it up on deck and perform emergency surgery to replace a newly replaced O-ring that was completely blown out. The whole breakdown and reassembly took about twenty minutes, so the airgun was back in the water in 30 minutes total. We retested the airgun, and it still was leaking. Grr… We set up the “operating table” in the galley and found that the new blue O-ring was already torn up after about ten shots. This was indicative that some component of the airgun was not aligned correctly or greased enough. So, we slowly took the entire airgun apart, piece by piece; some people were cleaning everything to get rid of any silt, clay, mud or sand particles that could be causing friction and tearing, while Lei Guo and I were helping Steffen breakdown each component of the airgun and providing him with new parts to replace some of the old ones. An hour later, everything was clean, replaced, and regreased and the airgun was back in the water for another test. Our efforts were to no avail. Now, at this point, it is about 11 and I remember that I volunteered to cook lunch for the entire crew and research team today. So, while the rest of the team re-disassembled the airgun, I rushed around to grill the chicken, cook the rice, and fry the vegetables for a total of 14 people. Fortunately, everything seemed to come together all at once. At around noon, I got the news that they had found the source of the problem in the airgun, that everything was working fine, and we were starting our acquisition for the day. Ten minutes later, all the food was finishing at the same time and I got the pleasure of being able to tell the entire crew that lunch was served. By the way, you do not know what hot is until you have had to stand in front of a grill, on a dark steel deck, with the mid-day sun beating on your back. We ended our acquisition at 5pm, and were started on the 4 hour drive back to Memphis by 6:30pm. Besides a stop for food and gas, it was a straight shot back to Memphis. I fell into my bed that night and passed out immediately. The day was about 5 hours longer than expected, but the experience was well worth the frustration. Oh, also, it was my birthday! Wednesday, June 30th – The M/V Strong had steamed two days up the river without rest to meet us at Mud Island to restart our surveying. The day before we had done 13 miles of survey, leaving about 6 miles left for the following day. Our intention was to knock out the last 6 miles in a few hours and then spend the rest of the day disentangling our entire operation from the M/V Strong. Well, I looked down at some data that I was processing and the next thing I knew I was getting tapped on the shoulder by Steffen who informed me that it was time to take everything apart. The next three hours were a scramble of disconnecting equipment, packing it all into boxes and loading it into a big box truck to be taken back to Austin. It was really amazing to see how well we communicated as a team now that we had spent 18 days on the river getting to know each other. We took a few group photos with the crew and then left for Memphis. That marked the end of our research cruise, and I definitely had mixed feelings towards the end. Part of me was happy to be sleeping in my own bed and not having to get up at 5:30am to get to the boat, but the other part realized how unique of an experience that was and knows that I will treasure my time on the M/V Strong for the rest of my life.

2011-07-07T14:37:07-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/back_at_the_beginning

So I didn't get much of a chance to work wit the European data to see if it will solve the issues we've been having, but now I am going back my old friend, the TA array. Although the back projections turned out weird and smeared in the same direction as the HINET (which is our sort-of base array that has stayed the same throughout this process), we are taking a new approach with the P-alignments to try and remedy the smearing issue. To accomplish this, we are aligning a smaller deep aftershock associated with the original 3 events, aligning it (which is easier due to its more impulsive waveforms), then using it as a base to align the three larger magnitude earthquakes. We hope that this will give us a better alignment and solve our back projection issue. If not, I don't know what we are going to try.  It's interesting because Eric and Miaki expected the alignments to be no problem. However, due to the uniqueness of these earthquakes (the fact that they are pretty emergent for deep earthquakes) is causing some issues with the way they usually perform the back projection technique. Once we finally get data we can use, Eric assures me we will make great leaps as the rest of the internship progresses and by the time the AGU abstract submission deadline approaches.  The first few weeks I spent here I didn't have much to do and I was kind of moping around due to boredom, but I realized today that I have plans every weekend until school starts back up again. Who knew I actually had a life? I sure didn't.  The Boston Pop's Fireworks Spectacular was a lot of fun! I walked about 2 miles down to MIT and found a perfect spot for viewing. I was advised to go early and make a day of it, so I got there around 5:30 (fireworks were scheduled for 10:30) and I was sort of surprised there wasn't more to do. People were just sitting around on their blankets like a mass picnic. I expected more of a carnival I guess, with food and maybe some games or something. On the opposite side of the river, there was a concert hall where Martina McBride and Michael Chiklis performed (along with some other instrumental performances). I didn't go over there, but it is more likely there were more entertaining things to do since that was the base for most of the events. That's ok, though I had plenty of studying time for the GRE. I am just glad I remembered to bring my book. If I were to go again, and opt out of the concert- related festivities, I would get there 2 hours early instead of 5. The flyover was cool, and the fireworks were great. I expected the 'grande finale' to be a lot grander. It struck me as being incredibly short. But it was still a fun night out.  Today a high school friend of mine was visiting Harvard with a group of kids she is teaching this summer through a program at Yale, so we got to meet up and take a couple pictures at Harvard. It is so fun and exciting to share this place with someone from home. Not to mention spending time with a great friend. Although we both had to work today, it was great seeing her. I am also going to see her during a trip we are taking to Providence. Since it is about half way between Yale and Harvard, we are going to meet up the weekend before my birthday to celebrate. I am really looking forward to it. I also found out this week that a college friend of mine is going to be on the east coast to check out some grad schools and she is organizing a stop in Boston to see me for a few days! That should be a ton of fun too! I cannot overstate how much fun it is to share new places with people who actually know you (instead of the the friends that I just met).  This turned into a considerably longer post than I intended, so I guess I will update once we get over this next step. I hope we do soon because these P-waves are starting to drive me a little crazy. 

2011-07-06T16:07:38-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/5_down_4_to_go

Still alive for those of you who were concerned It has been a crazy first three weeks here in New Haven but so far so good. The plan as of now is for me to create receiver functions for nine seismic stations along the 
Ryukyu
 Arc (in SW Japan) and then do some forward modeling to try and locate anisotropic layers in the subduction zone. Specifically we are looking for evidence of serpentinization in the upper mantle of the subduction zone. So far I have completed five receiver functions and have gotten quite the hang of it while becoming comfortable using unix and SAC. Erin, the grad student I am working with, has been incredibly helpful especially as I was struggling through the first few stations. I will be using GMT later and am hoping it wont send me through too many bottles of advil... this is one of my first reciever functions. the vertical axis is back azimuth and the horizontal axis is time (in sec) from the first P wave arrival. The left box is the radial component an the right box is the transverse component. red indicates a transition from slow to fast while blue indicates a region of fast to slow. On a less academic note, I have unofficial joined the geology departments softball team. we play a game once a week against one of the other science departments (last week was neuroscience I believe). We are not very good but there is a grill and beer involved so no one is terribly upset that we have yet to win a game. While it has rained quite a bit I have to say I am grateful for a break from the southern heat. and as for the obligatory workspace picture (I am pleased to annouce that I am no longer homeless)...   there you have it. over andddd out.

2011-07-06T13:58:06-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/week_4_slowly_but_surely

This was the start of the second third of my time here in Puerto Rico. The most significant thing that happened is that I obtained the code for calculating the focal mechanism in the hypo-inverse format. Now I am still working to understand it all. More to report on the next blog!

2011-07-05T14:25:10-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/field_work_time_for_me

I will try to do a longer entry later, but I'll give you the short version now. My family came to visite me and got here Wednesday night and staryed until thismoreneing when took off back home. This was a fun visit and we did some cool things I'll talk about later. The bigger news was that Wednesday evening (when I got to meet with my advisor the one hour he was here last week) he told me I would be going out and doing field work starting today (Teusday) for the entier week. So I have been a bit overwhelem with being busy and with the really hot and humid weather here. We had a heat index of 100 degrees over the weekend. It should be a little better this week while I am installing seismometers, but some how I think it will feel pretty hot out while I am digging holes all day. I will give you more info on my previous week and on how my feild work goes this weekend after I get back from field work on Saturday.

2011-07-05T07:25:37-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/exciting_results_...for_me

So I've been doing multitudes of PcP-P measurements. I haven't gotten THAT far, however 2 events that I chose to do that took place in the Mediterranean, have so far produced excellent PcP! I'm really excited about it, and I'm hoping that the other events give me just as nice wave forms. I'm sure you all know that feeling of elation when waves which are supposed to align perfectly do So happy. So Yeah that's my quick update!

2011-07-04T22:15:31-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/update_on_goals

A lot of people have been asking me about Goal #3, however, after discussing it with a knowledgable ecologist I decided against mailing a living slug to the East Coast. Since I do not want to be a slug killer, I will not want to mail a dead slug either. So the following pictures taken in the forest will have to suffice:

2011-07-04T17:49:46-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/week_41

This week has been much busier than the previous three, I've been helping prepare data from the Ocean Bottom Seismometers (below) to run the tremor detection program on them. The data is from the first 6 months of 2000. (Figure from Brown, et al, 2005) Early in this coming week I should have the tremor counts from that data. Meanwhile, looking again at data from 2000 but ignoring the OBS data for now, I have been comparing the detected earthquakes to the detected tremor. In a couple of days I will post a picture of the plots from that. Susan thought it would be interesting to see if our tremor detection code could be altered to detect earthquakes. Using data from 2009 (as well as 2010) I tried to switch the frequencies used for detection from low frequencies to the high frequences of earthquakes and then compare it to the earthquake detection catalog put together by someone analyzing the data on Antelope. As you can see below, even when I altered the time window used for detection the Matlab code does not seem ever similar to what was actually detected. When looking at these plots, as with the others, the y-axis is latitude, x-axis longitude, and color bar signifies what day in the week the event occured.                                                    EQ Catalog Plot                                    Matlab's detections using a 300s time window (the same used for tremor)                                             Using a 180s time window.                                                                       Using a 120s time window. Perhaps Matlab's detection will improve if I increase the correlation needed for detection. For tremor we were requiring 0.5 correlation, for earthquakes this week I will try to raise that to 0.8 and see if the results are cleaner. Susan also realized this week that a huge a mount of data from 2007 and 2008 had not undergone our tremor detection process, so I also spent time converting the files into SAC and enveloping them. This week I will be able to start running the detection script on them as well. Along with all this work keeping me busy, I've explored new running trials and went hiking with seismologist Lian, Han, Ling Ling, and Marine in the Big Basin State Park.  All of us inside a giant redwood tree! From left to right, Ling Ling, Marine, me, Lian, Han. See how big the redwood tree is? This tree lived for over 1500 years, it started to grow during the time of the Byzantine Empire in ~500 AD!

2011-07-04T17:43:43-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/sydney

Sydney this weekend was pretty cool. I walked around quite a lot and soaked in the sights and tourist traps, which made it a lot of fun. Specifically, Manly Beach was lovely. There were a lot of cool things to see and shops to browse at. Although, I went into a shop near Darling Harbour and knocked down and nearly broke about 300$ worth of Aborginal pottery. Luckily none of it broke.   But anyway, it was fun, and I figured I'd leave this picture. This little guy flew to join me while I was eating lunch, supposedly "The Best Meat Pies in Sydney!".   He seemed a little skeptical too.

2011-07-03T07:06:03-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/im_back

Yesterday at around 1 am we arrived back in Corvallis. I moved into a dorm where I'll be living with a bunch of other REU students for the rest of the summer. I am both excited and nervous to be back and really starting to work on my project. I have a lot to do and the AGU abstract deadline is just over a month away. But at the same time I am looking forward to diving into my research. The fieldwork took a bit longer than we anticipated. Just when we thought we were almost done we would run into something that would set us back a few days. But we finally got it all done. It will be difficult to transition from working in the field to working in the lab, but I feel up to the challenge.  This weekend I am going to take some time to explore Corvallis, as well as the coast. It should be a lot of fun. As promised, here is a picture from Nevada:

2011-07-01T18:26:37-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/drat

Ok, so after the TA array not working out I spent all week trying the Australian and New Zealand arrays and finally got it all the way through the P-alignments and back projection only to be told it still won't work. Drat. Now I am downloading data from yet another network of arrays, this time in Europe then I will have to run MORE P-alignments and back project those into what will (hopefully) be the winning combination so I can move on to more interesting things. So all in all, I am trying to stay positive after my second week of hard work that has turned useless.   In other news, on Monday I am going down to the huge 4th of July celebration by the Charles River here in Boston. Luckily I will be able to walk to the river and hang out in the sun all day and see one of the best fireworks displays in the country (my favorite part)! I will be charging my camera tonight so I can document. Although my camera is definitely not designed for fireworks pictures, I will try to get some good ones to share on here. I will also be spending quite a bit of time studying for the GRE, which I take July 15th...it's coming up way too fast! I'm not ready yet, but hopefully I will be. I am going to try and study outside because I have been cooped up in the computer lab for 3 weeks now and I need some vitamin D! I am probably going to be laughed at once I get back to MN and San Diego because I will have started the summer with a better tan than at the end. So strange. Anyway, that's about all I have for now, I have to get a jump on my P-alignments before the long weekend.  Happy 4th of July! 

2011-07-01T16:54:00-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/just_pick_to_the_beat

This week I got my very on data set from Jalisco! Mike ran it through Antelope initially, so now my job (as I'm sure I must have said before) is to go through and look at the events that Antelope chose and pick P and S waves so that a model can use my picks to estimate a hypocenter for the detected earthquake. This particular data set runs from January 23, 2006 to March 22, 2006 and while I've been working diligently I feel like I've barely made a dent in this data. There are a ton more stations and many more events than in the Oaxaca data that I practiced with for the few weeks before this. However, I'm getting better at recognizing when an event Antelope picked is deeper than I want (the model I'm using is for shallow quakes) or not really an event at all so I don't waste time picking wave arrivals for 30 stations or so only to find that the residuals are enormous or the location fluctuates hugely every time I run the model. Progress! But since I spend my days choosing waveforms, I've learned that the best way to get through this is to just try and pick to the beat. This isn't actually possible at all considering I have to look at the waves closely and switch from station to station, zooming in and out depending on the view I need to make a pick; you just can't time that to any kind of musical beat. BUT I just wait for the moment when I've made all my arrival picks for the event and I get to go back to the dbloc2 window (instead of dbpick where I locate and label wave arrivals) and click on each pick I made so it turns from gray to black meaning it will be taken into acount when I press the 'Locate' button to run the model. This I can do to the beat. My song for this week was "Château (Briefs Remix)" by Housse De Racket (sent to me by my friend Sam J.) - you can hear it here: http://www.514blog.com/2011/06/kitsune-presents-gildas-kitsune-club-night-mix/, it's number 12 on the playlist (pretty sick playlist overall too). Locating earthquakes aside, this week has been pretty low key. Last night, Stephany (one of the grad students and former IRIS intern) had me, Brady, Martin and some other people over for some phenomenal homemade pico de gallo (I got to cut up the cilantro and the onions!), pizza, explosive fun playing a volcanic disaster card game, and apples to apples (always a quality choice). Good times! Other than that, I really can't believe I've been here for almost a month... aaand that's about it. Happy 4th of July weekend!

2011-07-01T15:11:26-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/weeks_3_4

So, I never got around to posting a blog last week because I was feeling kinda like...   But, after working through all the pain and frustration of picking, over and over again...and struggling with MATLAB to make preliminary figures, I finally got myself an image of one of the lines in the Salton Trough! YAY! Here you go Rob, this is what I've been up to for the past couple weeks. Now it's on to the interpretation and tomography parts of the project!   On a lighter note, I'm gonna be spending my birthday and the fourth of July in Washington D.C.! No better place to spend Independence Day right? Also, the field work portion of this project that was cancelled may still have a chance of taking place! I'm excited to see the Northwest U.S. and get out from behind this computer!

2011-07-01T15:01:22-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/more_hash_programming

I have been very busy working with the HASH program this past week.  Obtaining the first-motion polarities for all of the seismic stations associated with the Santa Barbara event took much longer than it probably should have.  I drastically over-filtered the waveforms my first time through so I got all of the polarities incorrect and the focal mechanism that the program calculated looked inside out and backwards from what was expected.  I had much more success my second time through - I decided not to filter the waveforms at all unless absolutely necessary.  Most of them were surprisingly "clean" (not noisy) anyway and I could easily pick off the first-motion. Running this data through the program with the standard inputs was extremely simple once it was properly formatted.  But that would make for a rather uninteresting project, so my challenge of the week was altering the HASH program itself as well as some of the input parameters to better suit my offshore data.  I had to write a subroutine to the main program that runs parallel and nearly identically to a currently existing subroutine.  The primary difference is that the one that I had to create will identify the ALBACORE (the chosen name of the OBS network deployed last summer) station names rather the standard SCSN station names so that the main program will be able to perform calculations using that data once it is available.  I have data from one of the OBSs as well as a hydrophone for the Santa Barbara event to test the program with.  So far, it is not running quite as I would like it to, but is functioning enough to allow me to move on and come back to it when I have a bit more time.  This is especially important as part of my project is to compare focal mechanisms calculated with and without the island stations, which includes the OBSs. I also went back through a few scientific papers about the seismic history and geology of the region of interest offshore California, known as the Continental Borderlands.  These papers allowed me to come up with eight additional velocity models to use with HASH, which comes with a standard five.  I have run the program for the Santa Barbara event with each of these individual velocity models to determine which best describes the borderlands and will, therefore, give me the most accurate focal mechanisms.  Based on error outputs, the program seems to be favoring certain velocity models that are not compatible with the offshore region.  I need to re-read the less-than-helpful user manual and go through the code again to learn how it is calculating the error because the results would make far more sense if I were just interpreting them incorrectly.  Once I have a better understanding of the error, I will be able to select or create the best velocity model to use with all of my data. My advisor, Monica, is on vacation this week and part of next so she has left me with plenty to work on while she is away.  She would like me to start calculating focal mechanisms with and without island stations for all of the magnitude 3.0+ earthquakes that have occurred offshore since the OBSs were deployed last August.  This means that I have to download the waveforms for all of these events from the painfully slow SCEDC STP website.  I had hoped to download and interpret the waveforms for at least two events today, even if it meant working later than usual.  I only got through one.  Unfortunately, the website went from sluggish to a complete halt once the other students on campus got back from work and started using up all the bandwidth.  At least now I know that I should download all the waveforms I need for the day in the morning when the internet is fastest. This past weekend I got to see one of my friends from my internship last summer who I haven't seen in a year!  It was really nice getting to see him and will hopefully get to hang out with him at least a few more times this summer before I go back to New Jersey.  I've also been making good use of the pool out here and have been trying to go swimming at least twice a week (injured shoulder permitting).  One of my new friends from the hall even goes with me sometimes.  I'm very excited for this weekend as my parents are flying into California this evening.  We're going to Santa Barbara for the weekend and I have been promised surfing!!  I haven't even bothered to check surf reports because the waves couldn't possibly be any worse than they are at the Jersey shore, although the water is probably colder.  Don't be surprised if the first pictures I post on my blog are of some gnarly waves

2011-06-29T20:56:13-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/here...ish

So I am finally in Las Vegas and have actually been to the place I'm working!  I still don't know much about what data I'll be looking at and specifics because my advisor has been in meetings since I got here.  Today I was actually not allowed to go with her because of classified information related things.  But anyways I got to see the large mac I'll be using, and went through the online training so that I now know what to do if I run into a desert tortoise or radiactive things (hopefully I won't see any radioactive tortoises).  Plus I got a security briefing and got to sit in on a meeting about the source physics experiment and how they plan to do their next explosion. So now my only issue is finishing trying to get a new apartment that is within reasonable range of where I'm working, and hopefully the one I saw today works out.

2011-06-29T17:26:24-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/practice_practice_practice

This week I continued to practice using Antelope using the Oaxaca database that Mike gave me last week. Antelope suggests P and S wave arrivals then allows me manually evaluate and modify the wave arrivals that the program chose. From this, the program then gives me residuals in order to assess the precision of the picks and calculates a latitude, longitude, and depth for the hypocenter of the earthquake.  I have been working through the entire month of July 2006 and finished it this Friday! As I've learned, techno remixes, dubstep, and rap are clutch in powering through. Anything with a good beat really. My song to share from this week's playlist (and from my friend Evan) is an energetic mashup of Avicii, New Boyz, and Lady Gaga, called "Dancing in the Backseat": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h9r0iaymPI. With the help of my 'motivational' music, I have gone through a lot of data and have become very comfortable with choosing arrivals and manipulating dbloc2 to get the best outcomes for earthquake location. I'm sure this will serve me well next week when I start working on the database Mike has made for me from Jalisco!  Aside from work this week, Martin, Brady, and I discovered (while watching the USA vs Panama soccer game in the Gold Cup) each others' love and appreciation of Star Wars. So we decided we had to watch them all together (except not the most recent three, since we all agree that these movies, well, suck). We finished with Return of the Jedi on Friday night with a fantastic meal of pizza and cheesy bread with marinara sauce. Such quality evenings.  Other than working, I've been attempting to fulfill my duties as a collegiate water polo player and have been really good about lifting and swimming this whole week. I even ran a few miles (breaking news since I haven't run at all in over a year). I also found the library on my trek to the pool one morning and Brady went and got a library card, which is great because now I know I can get one and maybe find some books to read (or do GRE practice from - I still haven't decided when to take the test...) instead of eating everything in my fridge and watching online episodes of The Big Bang Theory. It looks like the weather here is finally getting slightly less rainy (not complaining because at least it's not so humid when it rains) which will be nice, if only because it'll be sunny enough for us to play some more sand volleyball. I need to practice! If the sun's out, maybe I'll switch it up and just hang out at the pool (for fun!!!) in the apartment complex. Who knows what this next week will bring!

2011-06-29T13:58:15-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/week_32

Last week I was a busy bee trying to read as many papers I could on T phases and seismology on mid ocean ridges. It was really interesting. I love learning about new environments I am not familiar with. I finished my little Proposal about for my project this summer. It was extremely helpful and allowed me to get my thoughts in order. I am really ready to buckle down and keep working! I made some progress with the data set I am working on. The swarm of earthquakes were recorded by other instruments in the area including the Navy's Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) and the 2 ocean bottom seismometers plus the 6 temporary onshore seismometers that are part of EarthScope's FlexArray. I spent last week locating the August 2008 swarm with coordinates that SOSUS and ANSS gave. The locations for each array did not agree with one another. The strike was relatively the same, but the the locations were offset vertically and horizontally from one another. This could be for various reasons. The next step would be to plot the earthquakes recorded from the COLZA network using the algorithm that I mention in my last post. I have not had much time to go back and play with the parameters. I also have to finish up looking at the peak to peak magnitudes for the August 2008 event and seeing if I can assign a magnitude to the smaller earthquakes. If all works well, I can gather a b-value then. My adviser told me that there was another earthquake swarm in October of 2008. This was a much smaller event, but happened in the same region as the larger August 2008 swarm. As it says in my summer description, the August 2008 swarm had 75 earthquakes recorded by onshore seismometers with the largest being a 5.9. This is a large number of earthquakes for a mid ocean ridge. In comparison the October 2008 swarm only had 1 recorded earthquake with onshore seismometers. If I can define a function to estimate magnitudes for small earthquake using the August 2008 swarm then I can apply it to the October 2008 swarm. It will be interesting to see how the two events compare. This past weekend was AWESOME! I went on a camping trip with the other COAS REU students to check out the Cascades. I saw so many amazing volcanoes this weekend! It was so exciting!!! I got to see Newberry (Including the Obsidian Flow), The 3 Sisters, Mt. Jefferson, Mt Hood, Mt Bachelor, Lava Butte, lots of cinder cones, and many other amazing volcanic features. It was AMAZING! I am a volcano lover though so of course I loved it. The adviser for the COAS REU is a geologist so he was able to tell us about the geology of region. Now back to work. I hope everyone has a good week!  

2011-06-28T13:01:59-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/week_2_sorry_its_a_bit_late

Last week was a lot of fun. I meet all the other COAS REUers last week and I am having a great time getting to know them all! On wednesday we went to Newport to visit the Hatfield Marine Science center. It was so much fun! We got to go on a tour of the facilities and see all the research that is going on there. They had a cool aquarium with local fish and sea life there too. The best part was the Pacific Octopus. It was soooo beautiful… (but octopus are my favorite animal so I have a biased opinion). After that we went on a little hike on the coast. There were all these beautiful jointed basalt flows on the sandy beach. We climbed up to the top of them and it was a magnificent view! I am so in love with the rocky beaches of the west coast. Right now I am looking at the T-waves and finding the peak to peak amplitudes compared to the magnitudes of each of the earthquakes that was recorded by the ocean bottom seismometers and hydrophones. It is a bit tedious but so rewarding once I can plot them all up and see that it working. At some point I will be able to find the b value of the 3 day earthquake swarm and that will hopefully give me more evidence that this swarm was due to magmatic activity in the crust. We are trying to figure out if we can assign a magnitude to the smaller events. Even if we cannot acheive this, it will tell us more about the characterization of T-phases. I also started working on a program that cross correlates the T-waves so that I can eventually locate each of the earthquakes. I spent all day on Monday working on the program and I finally got it to work! The only problem is that it is giving me some “out there” answers. I am going to have to go back and work on it some more and fiddle with the filtering and the time window to see if I can get some better lag time and correlation values I am also working on a Proposal for my research. It is mostly just for my own benefit so that I can get all my thoughts and methods out on paper. It also forces me to write more about the background of what i am studying. It will come in handy when I send my abstract to AGU in just a little over a month or so. I am really enjoying reading about mid ocean ridge geology and seismology… I am learning so much about a subject I really did not know much about. Here is a really cool website that kinda gives the reader a clue of what I am working on… It is what the hydrophones (pretty much microphone that are underwater) are “hearing” in the oceans… There are signals from whales, earthquakes, volcanoes, ships, and mystery sounds. T-waves (what I am using to study the earthquake swarm) are used for so many applications including: submarines, ships, whales, volcanoes, and earthquakes. http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/sound01/background/seasounds/seasounds.html This past weekend was SO MUCH FUN! On friday we went downtown and got Gelato and it was yummy. Then on Saturday 4 friends and I went to this festival called Faerieworlds in Eugene OR. It was a Celtic music festival. It was kind of like a renaissance fair but more fantasy themed. There was belly dancing, juggling, lots of good bands, great food, and amazing costumes.  

2011-06-28T12:30:08-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/i_sense_a_tremor_in_the_force

In light of having a Star Wars marathon last week that phrase really stuck out! I wish I had Darth Vader's ability to sense tremor, but since I don't I have  find tremor using SAC and GMT. I was successful in writing a few scripts that make my life a whole lot easier. My daily routine during the week consists of me finding a decent sized earthquake, larger than magnitude 8.0 and downloading the information of of IRIS's Wilber site. As I am looking for triggered tremor in Alaska I select the Alaska Regional Network and if it's available the Alaska Volcanic Observatory stations. Depending on when the Earthquake occurs I have anywhere between 17-56 stations to work with. As I found out it is much easier to find tremor if you have more stations. I need to confirm it on more than one station, preferably three, but when I only have 17 stations that becomes very difficult and I have to throw out what looks like really good tremor because I can't confirm it on any other stations (this is really frustrating).  The goal is to find triggered tremor by hand and soon I will start working on a code to hopefully automate the process. I found tremor by hand and I will be seeing if my code can find the same thing, it should be fun, I enjoy programming. My attempt at organizing my data: The hardest part of this whole process has been the challenge of trying to keep everything organized! I have worked through 7 big teleseismic events. I found the easiest was to use a spreadsheet and mark stations that had similar signal. If I do this I can go back and look at them in detail grouped together because if it's by itself I can't use it anyway. I have also been using screenshots like crazy! They seem to be the best way to allow me to go through and glance at the data because even though I wrote scripts and it only takes a few commands to filter and display my data it is still very time consuming. If I take screenshots I can quickly glance at what I think is tremor and what is not, if I am not sure I can pull up the data. I usually go through an earthquake group similar signals, then go back through the similar signals that might have tremor take screen shots and mark them so I can go back to them easily. I USED THE FORCE TO FIND THIS TREMOR! I have also been reading a statistics book, since I don't know anything about statistics and also studying for the GRE which I am going to try and take before I head back to Reno. Martin, Lizzie and I are thinking about going to a Reds game and possibly a shooting range in Kentucky! Oxford is pretty quiet but there are a lot of people in the apartment complex and Martin and I played volleyball with a lot of people last night for a couple hours. It was really fun.   Till Next Week!

2011-06-28T10:18:46-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/success

So, the meeting Tuesday did go well, and we decided to use a hp filter of 1 and in some cases 1.1 on some of the SAC files. So this is all good. I also picked 27 events that I will look at, and all but 3 satisfy the criteria of a.) having a depth > 80 and b.) having a body magnitude greater than 5.8. I picked 3 others that were in interesting places so I could see a more global spread of PcP-P. Many of my events are in Kamchatka and just north of Antarctica, in order to get the right parts of the CMB. Anyway, so I was given Friday off because Hrvoje is going to a conference in Melbourne for a week, so I decided I'm going to Sydney this weekend. I'm excited, and a little nervous, because if I can't find someone to go with I'll be alone. I'm hoping one of my new friends will be game! Aside from this, all I can say is that in my meeting today I had the best conversation about how much of our "knowlege" of the compositions of other planets is all speculation. It excited me that something I'm really interested in has so much work to be done. Although, in order to know more about other planets we first really need to learn what the heck's going on in our interior, so here's to working on that!

2011-06-28T01:20:07-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/lost_but_then_found

It turns out my worry about storms last week was unfounded. While it did storm again, and the power didn’t go out, the data I was downloading managed to find some issues of its own. Of course this happened on Wednesday, the same day my advisor, Gary Pavlis, left town for the week, which means I was lost. Solving the problems of how to obtain data using UNIX commands was beyond my scope of knowledge, so I just had to wait until this morning to see what could be done. In the mean time Gary found a way to start obtaining some of the other data we needed. The bottom line is that as of this morning I have data! At least for 2008 anyway, and that is going to take me at least a week to process which gives me lots of time to work on obtaining the rest of the data I need. In the mean time I have been going out and exploring Bloomington on the weekends. I went to the farmers market and bought some tasty veggies and some delicious clover honey. I have also made my way over to the local mall to take a look around and I have already done some shopping. This last Saturday the weather was especially gorgeous. It was partly sunny with a high temperature of 75 degrees (by my northern standards this is a nice warm day). It seemed perfect to go hiking. So after getting lost due to construction, changing plans about 3 times and having a nice drive I finally found a national forest where I could hike for free on some great trails in the woods. It reminded me of being farther north, and I even saw a while tailed deer on the hike. This whole week will be filled to the brim with data processing, so I guess my only goal for this week is to get as much done as possible. It will be a repetitive and long task, but with some occasional breaks hopefully I won’t get too worn down by it. At least I have gained confidence after this last week because every time I do get lost I seem to find another answer, even if it wasn't the original answer I was looking for.  

2011-06-27T18:34:15-05:00 http://www.iris.edu/hq/internship/rss/interns/aw_fooey

So in my last post I mentioned how the TA array may not work at all. Well that has been confirmed. Now I have moved on to using the Australian and New Zealand arrays to see if they work better and my first couple P-alignments do not look good. Below is a sample and you don't even need to know what a P-wave is to know that that is not right. Looks like I have some more frustrating days ahead of me. I will keep you posted on my progress, which hopefully comes soon.

2011-06-27T12:36:36-05:00