Here I am sitting at my computer on my last day of the internship. I figured I should reflect a little while I have the time and everything is still fresh in my mind. To do this I looked back at my first real post.

1) My post is a huge chunk of text which made me realize how much I love paragraphs.

2) I have a nice summary of what I was planning on doing this summer, and that's actually what I did.

3) Goal 1 - look up RTD bus route. Check, that was really successful.

4) Goal 2 - Be a sponge. This was a good goal. I learned a ton this summer about seismology, receiver functions, writing scripts, SAC, GMT, and MATLAB. In addition to learning things about my project I also learned lots about the Rio Grande Rift and the current GPS study involving that area from the other intern. It's hard to realize that I have learned so much because I learned everything gradually. It wasn't a big defining moment where magically I knew it all, I worked to know it. Since I am going to continue working for my host during the school year all of this knowledge will be useful and that will be the true test of how well I know everything.

5) Goal 3 - Become more active in the geophysics world. I joined AGU and SEG. I am not recieving their publications (like EOS) and love reading them. It's nice to know what else is going on in the geophysics world.

6) Bring a jacket to work. Double check. I still froze and even had to take a walk outside during lunch to get warm, but the jacket was helpful.

7) Be prepared for AGU. I think I will be well prepared for AGU with the help of the people I have been working with this summer. Now the big decision is trying to figure out which figures and plots to put on my poster. My abstract is still in the editing phase but it's coming along.

Overall I am very satisfied at the conclusion of my internship. I don't think things could have gone better (minus the freezing). I would like to thank everyone involved for making this a pleasant experience.

I am excited that we can load pictures!!! Since my last blog a few things have happened. Yesterday I did my "final" presentation to the group. There were about 7 people who attended and overall it could have gone worse. It was a nice short little power point with nice pictures. The best part was showing my results and having other people look at them. New eyes always see something different. Today is technically my last day as an IRIS intern, but I am going to keep working over the next two weeks. Then once school starts I will continue working with my host on a new project. Hopefully over the next two weeks I will finish up my project, do my abstract, and do my poster. For now I want to share my images with all of you...

Station TYM (the one shown) is north-west of Yucca Mountain. This is the plot I was talking about last time (with some nice changes thanks to Andy). In the upper left corner is the moveout plot sorted by slowness. We are able to see a strong arrival around 3 seconds. The two plots on the right show stacked receiver functions. The receiver functions are sorted by backazimuth (the angle of which the earthquake is relative to the station, north is 0). The sorting is important in case the signal is different coming from different directions. On interesting thing noticed at this station is the strong positive (red) arrival at 3 seconds in the radial that flips polarity in the transverse. Looks like something interesting is happening there, just not sure what yet.

Station BTW is only slightly north of Yucca Mountian. This image is of multiple moveout plots of events from only specific backazimuths. The plots are 0-90, 90-180, 180-270, and 270-360. This is of interest because the Moho is shown nicely just after 4 seconds on the moveout plots from the SE and NW but does not show up from the other direction.

AMD is station farthest south of Yucca Mountian that we have data from. This plot is again a moveout plot but with moveout curves on the image. These moveout curves are based on a velocity model (which may be changing) from the area around Yucca Mountian and the Nevada Test Site. Here the plot shows moveout curves for interfaces at two depths and their reverberations. We are considering adding a sediment layer to our velocity model because the area is basin and range.

That's all for now. I am slowly working on my abstract and will post that when it becomes presentable.

This work is not funded by the Yucca Mountain Project and the results are not necessarily endorsed by it.

It's exciting to get results. No matter how bad or wrong they look. I have finished making receiver functions for around 30 stations near Yucca Mountain. With these receiver functions I have made moveout plots. I was really excited to show everyone the plots, but I can't upload images. I guess I can still talk about them and then post a picture when the whole upload thing gets figured out.

In thefigure there are four plots. The plots are of moveout from the radial reciver functions, a histogram of the number of receiver functions at each backazimuth, and a stack of the receiver functions sorted into backazimuth bins. The one problem is that the stacked data doesn't seem to show the same arrivals and crustal features as the moveout plots. My new goal is to figure out how to make those look alike. If anyone has ideas or suggestions that would be greatly appreciated.

Other than the figures I'm making I am beginning to work on my abstract for AGU (which I might not get to go to, but that's a different story). Next week on Thursday I will be presenting my research to the other interns, my advisor, the other people helping me, and whoever else happens to be around and wants to listen. That should be good practice. Let's hope I have everything figured out by then and actually have nice data to present.

I'm off back to solving the big problems of the day. I'll post again when I can post images.

So, what else have I been doing? I decided to do a quick update about what I have been doing outside of work since I have some time.

It has been hot here in Denver/Boulder/Arvada area. Today's it's supposed to get up to 101. Crazy that I'm sittting here in a jacket because I'm cold.

Anyway... two weekends ago I climbed Grays and Torreys. They are two 14ers in Colorado. People say they are some of the easier ones so that's where we started. It was a ton of fun, even if I wasn't sure I was going to make it. The two peaks are close to each other so we were able to summit both of them in one day.

This picture is of the two peaks. Grays is on the left and Torreys is on the right.

Here we are at the top of Grays. This is just proof that we made it.

The weekend before that I went camping with my family. That was nice because we were able to get away from the heat and the mountains were a comfortable temperature.

This is a picture of a perfect marshmallow fire. Just wanted to show everyone and prove that they do exist. The marshmallows and s'mores were really good.

Things are finally starting to come together for me. Last week we got a new intern. He is learning the basics right now, mostly GMT. But eventually he will be collecting data from IRIS around the Cheyenne Mountain Belt that will be processed in the fall. It's nice to have another person around the lab. Since he just started Anne gave him a little background tutorial/summary She talked about receiver funtions and moveout plots. This could not have come at a better time for me. I have been working with rfs and moveout plots all summer. I read about everything in multiple books at the beginning of summer, but when Anne talked about it a ton of stuff came together for me. The little lightbulb in my head turned on.

Lately I have been waiting for the scripts to be fixed. There were a few little bugs. This is taking a while because proposals are being written and life is in general crazy around here. But it has been a nice break. I have slowed down and focused on what I am doing. A lot of times I was running code and knowing what the output meant, but not thinking about the middle steps. I have looked through the code and begun understanding what's going on.

Also during this break I have been making maps with GMT and adjusting them so they look nice.

This is a map of the seismic stations near Yucca Mountain where I am receiving my data from. The SH stations are red triangles and the BH stations are purple circles. There are some stations with both BH and SH data.

This maps shows all of the events that I have data from. These events occured between 2000-2006 and are above a magnitude 5.8, with the largest having a magnitude of 8.30.