planetwater

The new director of the USGS, Marcia McNutt, presented the “Frontiers of Geophysics lecture” last night at the AGU fall meeting. She tried to give an overview of “what’s cool” within the USGS, leaving out all modelling efforts and Landsat.

Despite not being a remote sensing expert, I knew about “Landsat”, but I wasn’t aware that the USGS is involved in it in a big way. Being somewhat active on the modelling side, I was a little bit disappointed at first, but some of the “cool things” she presented, were actually cool. Also for modellers. Here is the list of “cool things” she talked about — without claiming being complete, these are my notes:

• Lidar: there are quite a few interesting research projects going on with Lidar, the difference being a different wavelength the Lidar is tuned to. I found an application for mapping ground surface below dense vegetation quite interesting.
• earthquake warning systems: there is an attempt to put an automatic warning system for California in place, which means for example that gas mains could be shut off automatically, assuming a warning time of a couple of minutes
• airborne geophysics of volcanoes
• unmanned aircraft: for desserts, below clouds
• research related to “atmospheric rivers”. This concept was new to me, but the atmosphere doesn’t seem to be as homogeneous as we’ve thought in the past – d’oh!
• “prospecting remotely”; the USGS completed an airborne hyperspectral survey of the surface of the entire country of Afghanistan in order to assess the situation of minerals in Afghanistan. According to McNutt, “Afghanistan is rich [in minerals] beyond your wildest dreams”. These resources could be used to help the country financially. It would be interesting to see the results.
• a US-wide map of methylmercury concentration
• Biochar for better soil and for carbon sequestration
• a plasma based mass-spectrometer;
• “creating moon dirt at 37,000°F” using a plasma-torch;
• arsenic in the evolution of earth and extraterrestrial ecosystems;
• gas hydrates discovered in the US gulf of Mexico;
• gas hydrates & climate change;

Last night the “tweetup” – a get together of people that twitter at the AGU fall meeting happened. There were many inspiring people, who are so passionate about the science they do, which was very inspiring.

Talking to Boreholegroup reminded me so much about my water-well drilling days! However, the scales are so different! The topics were quite different, nevertheless we do sometimes have similar issues, sometimes connections in the scientific areas we work on, and for sure connections when it comes to being inspired and being inspiring! As theAgu pointed out, it was “It was so great to meet all of you, and to put faces to screen names.” — thanks theAgu for supporting this!

update Tuesday; December 15, 2009: The folks of Wired Science, a source I often use, also blog from AGU!

I’m sitting in Moscone West. As Apple aficionado, this is right where Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference used to be!

Moscone Center, San Francisco

Day 1 of 5 is almost over. I’ve been to a few talks, I’ve been to a few posters. I’ve never been to a conference of a comparable size, so I am a little overwhelmed. The online calendar was really helpful. Scientifically, what was interesting?

• I saw C. Meirovitz’s poster on modelling alluvial fans with TPROGS. He’s trying to use borehole-log data to model hydro-facies in space. Channels that deposited gravel up to bolder size form preferential flow paths, and the simulation of those continuous features is not a trivial task; however, it is important because those are the pathways critical for non-linear processes such as solute transport. Very much related to my own work!
• I have never spent much time learning about fractals, but the concept of “self similarity” popped up at least twice today. Once in F. Schwartz’s talk on modelling prairie potholes, where he uses tho model the size of potholes in simulation by using two parameters (length and water-hight, if I remember correctly), and once in S. Neuman’s talk.
• Using insane amounts of data seems to become quite standard.
• Why are people so crazy about linear regression? And why do people who call themselves scientists refer to what they’re doing as linear regression, if both of their axes are log-scale? Similarly, I’ve seen at least two people who plot some measurement against some measure of scale. For small scales there are a lot of measurements, for large scales there are few measurements. Their argumentation is that measurements on the larger scale result in an average measurement. I am not 100% sure on this. It might also be that there simply are not many measurements on a larger scale, temporal or spatial.
• I saw a map of accumulated daily precipitation intensities, that is accumulated at a given location over a year, then spatially interpolated. That seems like a neat idea. Probably also for temperatures.
• This is nothing new, but well presented presentations are just so much better.

Now I’m off to the “frontiers of geophysics” lecture!

• I'd be all for a #geotweetup at #AGU09! (I'll be without internet until sunday evening at least) #
• @theAGU will be tweeting from #AGU09 #
• Am ready for #AGU09 ! Bag is packed, poster printed, looking forward to meet some fellow bloggers and twitterers! http://ur1.ca/hn5r #

Folks, I am getting ready for the AGU Fall conference, which starts tomorrow (Sunday) evening in San Francisco. I’ve never been to a scientific conference of that size, so I am very curious. I was browsing through the online database of talks and presentations, and it’s just mind-boggling.

Poster

My poster’s title is “Effects of Non-Gaussian Spatial Dependence of Hydraulic Conductivity on Hydrodynamic Macrodispersion”. Its ID is H43F-1093 and it will be presented on Thursday, Dec 17, starting at 1:40 PM in the Poster Hall (Moscone South). Come and drop by! It’s nice to meet blog-readers in person!

Copulas

The key method I am using are spatial copulas. I had set out to explain what this is on this blog here and here, but I have never gotten around to get really to what copulas are. I promise I will continue to write here about copulas as soon as I am back.

Geo-Bloggers

There is going to be a meeting of geo-bloggers on Wednesday! Some cool resources do exist already:

• a list online of who is registered
• a shared google.doc from @Boreholegroup of geo-bloggers who present their scientific work at AGU.
• a twitter list by @Allochthonous

I am looking forward to the show!

• It seems like not a huge surprise: Nature headline: Tar sands mining linked to stream pollution: http://twiturl.de/tobir #
• Stats: Fox claims that 120% of the public believes scientists falsify global warming data: http://twiturl.de/sitir #
• Hashtag for AGU Fall Meeting: #AGU09! Lots of cool people expected, including bloggers http://twiturl.de/gesuk #

Chaiten volcano eruption

More spectacular science pictures, including a cow with a gas-tank on its back at popsci.com

Conference in Quebec City homepage here

Deadline for abstracts for the conference “water 2010” in Quebec City, July 5-7, 2010