Nick's Blog

Blog Post 1

When I applied for this internship, I pictured myself in a room with materials much like those in my chemistry classroom. I would be using different advanced tools to observe and analyze samples. However, this is not what I’m doing in my supervisor’s lab in this internship. Instead, I’m in a computer lab coding on an satellite imagery tool called google earth engine. I’ve had a lot of fun learning how to use the software and seeing all the things that I could do with it, ranging from classifying an image based on what its data to collecting data about a particular area about vegetation. It was difficult to learn so much in such a short amount of time, but the hard work has paid off; I am working on a script of my own to help my supervisor with her research. Trying to figure out how to fix bugs in the program and make it do what I want it to do has been really challenging and fun.

The activities that we have been doing as a group on Wednesdays has also been interesting and engaging. The discussion about the anomalies in the Pacific Ocean and El Niño was particularly interesting in how it affects California. I didn’t realize what it was until we got further along in the discussion, and when I did, I realized that it was amazing that we could figure out that El Niño was happening just through those simple graphs. In the next week, learning about the graduate students’ work and how they got to be where they are now shed some light on what life could be like for me, beyond college.

On the trip today, where my first thought was that it was really cold, but once we started to learn about the geology of the area and around California, I (almost) forgot the cold and instead tried to soak up as much information as possible from Dr. Hilley, as it made me actually think about what could have caused, for example, a set of intrusive igneous rock to be far away from the rest of the mountain range, or why we saw sedimentary rock under the igneous lower layer rock. This trip got me more interested in geology and probably more confused about what I want to do later in life as well. Geology is just another option. If I come back to the headlands sometime with my family or go to another national park, I will definitely have other things to think about besides just getting up the mountain.

I hope to have more fun in the coming weeks at the internship!

Blog Post 2

A lot has happened between these two blog posts. I started and finished my first script after learning about Google Earth Engine and got data for my supervisor about the median maize crop yields in specific places in a county in the North China Plain. It took a long time to get everything to work. I had to come up with new things that I had never even thought up before to solve the problem. Every time I thought I had finished a new section of the script, an error came up that took (usually) ages to solve. Earth Engine is hard to debug in, and I had a lot of trouble with the error messages that came up. When I asked my supervisor for help, we usually managed to solve the problem ourselves, but if all else failed, we would ask the help forum. I started work on another script, which returns the best pictures in every year of a county, based on how much area of the county the image covers and whether there are clouds in the picture. I plan on extending the script, which only works on one county to work on many counties at the same time. The only trouble I foresee is how slow the program would run. The script already takes a good minute to run.

Picture Caption: This is one of my note pages for trying to figure out the program. I’m more than halfway through the pad already!

The trip to Monterey Bay was really fun. Looking at all the animals and learning about them was interesting; I would never have thought that there would be so much life just under a rock in the tide pools. It made me turn to a place where I never thought I would look or want to look. One of the amazing parts of the tide pools was the astounding amount of clams on the rocks. I was afraid that I would break their shells, but amazingly, they stayed strong. Another cool part was seeing the bigger animals up close; the sea stars, sea cucumbers, and the brittle stars (which are really ticklish when I held them).

I hope I continue to have as much fun as I have been having!

Blog Post 3

It’s hard to believe that this internship is already over. Since the second blog post, time has passed really quickly, probably because I’ve gotten into a rhythm. In the lab, I’ve gotten a lot done. I finished the final version of the script that calculates the vegetation index values for maize based on the distance from the demonstration field. At the end, there was this intractable bug that neither my supervisor or I could solve. I probably have stared at that error message for hours, trying to figure out a way to fix it. In the end, both Yi and I fixed it together by changing the dataset that we used.

When I finished the other script, I continued on a project on the side burners for almost the whole internship: a script to find the most cloud-free images that my supervisor might want to use when she extends her work to other counties in the North China Plain. This would make it easier for her work because she would not have to search for the best image every single time she wanted to do a calculation on a county, and instead, just pick the best image from the output of the script I wrote.

The days heading for the presentation were really stressful, trying to get the abstract for AGU and the presentation done at the same time. I got really nervous right before my presentation but I think I did a good job. I thought that I answered the questions well and that I explained my research pretty well. Listening to the other presentations and looking at the other posters was very interesting, since I didn’t know anything about others’ research.

I had tons of fun in this internship. It was awesome to learn about more fields of science, but it might have made me even more confused about what I want to do; everything sounds fun and cool. I would like to thank everyone who made this possible, especially Yi Zhao, my supervisor, David Lobell, the lab PI, Jenny Saltzman, who organized the whole thing, and Megan D’Errico, who took care of us throughout the whole summer. Thank you for reading!

Nick Sum