Shipboard Data Analysis
As an undergraduate student, I worked at the Marine Data Center within the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS). Outside of my undergraduate thesis focusing on East Pacific tropical cyclones, I had two primary tasks at the MDC. The first was monthly production of FSU's Indian Ocean wind stress product, compiled from buoy and ship observations. I downloaded the raw data, performed manual quality control, and published the completed work online.
Apart from this, my work mainly dealt with analyzing sea surface temperature data collected by research vessels within the SAMOS (Shipboard Automated Meteorological and Oceanographic System) initiative. I focused on ships which had multiple temperature sensors, comparing their readings and analyzing possible causes of biases between the two (or in some cases, three) sensors. With this, I developed an automatic quality control test to flag suspect SST data. This work led to my first research poster, which was presented by my supervisor at the MARCDAT-IV meeting in Southampton, UK in June of 2016.
I concluded this work and left COAPS upon graduating in 2017, fortunate to have had a year and a half there to be introduced to the research world!
