CW3E Undergraduate Researcher, Cody Poulsen, Awarded a SDEP Excellence Award

June 28, 2017

Cody Poulsen, an undergraduate student at UC San Diego pursuing a degree in Environmental Chemistry in the Environmental Systems (ESYS) Department and a minor in Digital Media, has collaborated on a research project with CW3E post-doc Scott Sellars. The project began during the summer of 2016 and was focused on using a program created by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) named Video Annotation Reference Systems (VARS) to produce useable meteorological metadata. VARS was created by MBARI to aid researchers in cataloguing the occurrences of biological species and geological formations in the large amounts of underwater footage collected by their ROVs. The research continued as part of Cody’s senior thesis during which he created an Atmospheric River metadata set with VARS. During the process, he learned more about the system and its capabilities. The metadata set is comprised of annotations for the location of AR landfall and center of AR events during the Water Years (WYs) 2001 and 2011. In addition, annotations for ARs with an associated Lower Level Jet (LLJ) structure where produced for both WYs. In the case study of WYs 2001 and 2011, the metadata depicted an anomalously high amount of landfalling AR events in California/Oregon for December 2010 juxtaposed to zero landfalling events along the North American West Coast excluding Alaska for December 2000. 500-hPa average wind speeds, heights, & direction plots for the two months where created to discern the general first principal flow that might explain the different AR trajectories. With these plots, it was found that a high-pressure ridge at 180° and low pressure trough at 140°W funneled ARs onto the California/Oregon coast for December 2010. Where December 2000 had a slight high pressure ridge along the coast to produce an insignificant blocking action leading to the assumption that some other synoptic features must be at play to produce the zero-event period.

For his senior thesis, Cody produced a poster on the VARS research project and presented it at the ESYS senior symposium. The symposium was comprised of poster presentations from each of the ESYS seniors that participated in research projects/ internships over their senior year. Cody and his research were selected by San Diego Environmental Professionals (SDEP) as one of the two projects to win an excellence award.

CW3E undergraduate researcher, Cody Poulsen, presents his research using VARS at the ESYS senior symposium.