Hi all, it has been a while since I've blogged, so I'll just start from the beginning.  It has been proposed that Fallen Leaf Lake (2km south of Lake Tahoe), due to its smaller size and much larger watershed-to-surface area ratio as compared to Lake Tahoe, provides a unique microcosm of the Tahoe Basin for paleoclimate studies.  In particular, several pine trees have been found still standing and rooted at approximately 36m deep.

It is just a rough draft and needs a good deal of cleaning up, but this is something of what I'm looking for in the sidescan data.  The path is from the southwestern edge of Fallen Leaf Lake: the inset is the sonar shadow of one of the trees that had already been found through visual confirmation.  Because of the steep dropoff from shore the upslope returns are much stronger, making any lakeward identifications difficult.  The second picture is our doughty research vessel, which I think should be called the Maurice Ewing II, but apparently some disagree. 

I'm finally getting started on the data analysis portion of my internship, although these past three days have been really slow.  Though I suppose that going through a dataset trying to find the best variables for an image and then waiting around for processing is merely par for the course, huh.  Now that everything's up and running and all the heretofore-buggy bits have been ironed out though, I should be able to finish the first 5 of 30-odd sidescan files today.

Hi all, I just got back last night from my trip to Fallen Leaf Lake and Tahoe.  Our sidescan sonar survey went perfectly *knock on wood* and so did LiDAR-ing to look at erosion caused by recent wildfires.  Fallen Leaf was a really cool place, the community itself has begun to do a fair bit of self-monitoring for the lake's clarity, pH, water height, etc, and we were able to get some help from a few members of the volunteer fire department as well as from a former U of Nevada Reno prof who lives there named John Kleppe.