Sun, Surf, and Studying ... in Hawaii!

Bethany Norris, a senior NIU meteorology major, had the incredible opportunity to spend nine weeks this past summer in Honolulu, Hawaii performing research through the prestigious NOAA Ernest F. Hollings Scholarship Program. As part of her internship, she contributed to a project entitled PRICIP, which stands for Pacific Region Integrated Climatology Information Products. The goal of this project is to understand the trends in the frequency and intensity of Pacific storms in order to predict the impacts of future storms, as well as convey this information in a format that is clear and accessible to the public.

Bethany spent the summer developing historical event anatomies, or case studies of past storms, for the project. These historical event anatomies had three main components: event overview, climatology, and impacts. Four events were chosen to research, two high tide events and two high surf events, all impacting the island of O’ahu.

Her research project included obtaining tide station and wave buoy data from the Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services and the National Data Buoy Center, along with information concerning the impacts of events from local television and newspaper web sites. In addition, since high surf in Hawaii is generated by extratropical storms traversing both hemispheres of the Pacific, surface weather charts covering the entire ocean basin were examined to determine when and where the waves were generated by these storms. She also assisted in developing a high surf event impacts chart, which is used to describe the types of hazards (e.g. washed out roads, risk of injury to surfers, lifeguard rescues) that can occur in various surf/tide scenarios.

As the only meteorologist on her research team, Bethany was able to evaluate, discuss, and write about topics such as development of extratropical cyclones and interpretation of surface and upper-air weather maps. Further, she was able to learn about ancillary, but valuable, topics such as surf forecasting, ocean wave characteristics, and coastal processes.

Bethany next to the vent on Kilauea.

This is the second summer in a row that has featured NOAA-sponsored travel for Bethany. In May 2007, she spent a week at NOAA headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland attending the Hollings Scholarship program’s orientation. The purpose of the orientation was to familiarize the scholars with NOAA and highlight the many opportunities available for the required internship. During her visit, Bethany attended presentations from a multitude of NOAA offices and divisions, toured a variety of NOAA facilities, and attended career fairs held specifically for the Hollings Scholars.

The NOAA Hollings Scholarship is just one of the amazing funding and pre-professional research opportunities for undergraduate atmospheric science students. We recommend that all of our undergraduate students who fit the eligibility requirements submit an application to this truly remarkable program.

Graduate Student Participates in Coop at Argonne

This summer, NIU Department of Geography graduate student Jenni Prell worked among scientists in the Environmental Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, a Department of Energy research center, under a Graduate Cooperative Education Appointment. Her main project was to assist in adjusting a climate model for biofuel research through the guidance of her supervisor Dr. V. Rao Kotamarthi. The goal of the ongoing project is to show what changes might occur in our environment if current land use practices were switched to grow crops used for different forms of biofuels. The Community Land Model (CLM) is being used to model these changes, but the version did not originally include crops as a plant-functional type (pft). Corn, wheat, and soybean were added into the model as crops that would be likely used for biofuel production, and Jenni's task was to develop a carbon allocation scheme that would distribute carbon, beginning from seed to harvest, to different parts of each plant. She was able to build on her computer programming skills to implement these changes into the model, while expanding her knowledge of crop dynamics. Jenni drew upon other models and scientific literature to help solidify the allocation scheme.

Aside from working on biofuels research, Jenni was also able to take part in various other responsibilities at Argonne. She assisted in measuring, collecting, and downloading Multispectral Radiometer (MSR) and Leaf Area Index (LAI) data at outdoor sites at Fermilab, which allowed her to get up close and personal with field instruments. Jenni also assisted meteorologist and instrument mentor Michael Ritsche in preparing new instruments for deployment to the Barrow, Alaska field site of the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program. The replacement of these instruments will be the focus of Jenni's thesis work, researching data quality issues of meteorological instrument change-outs.

Jenni earned her B.S. in Meteorology from NIU in Dec. 2007 and is currently working towards her M.S. in Geography/Meteorology at NIU.