Drilling with WyCEHG and Conferences Galore
I’ve been jam packed with class work and research this semester so I haven’t had much of a chance to update this. But now that I am, I can give you a little taste of what’s been going on…
WyCEHG Drilling - We are finally getting some ground truth to our geophysics in the Laramie Range! I have been spending hours along with other graduate students and a drilling crew up at one of our geophysics sites. The drilling crew has been working tirelessly to extract granite core directly under transects geophysics transacts that we previously collected. Jorden Hayes and Brady Flinchum will be working with this well data, along with various hydrologists once the wells are instrumented. Below is an iPhone photo from one of my early shifts at the rig.
Classwork - I’ve got an interesting array of classes this semester: Inverse Theory, Wildland Hydrology, and How to Write a Scientific Manuscript. They are all quite different as you would imagine, but so far, all three have proved to be immensely useful in various aspects of my research.
Research - I’ve been working on a couple different things with the airborne electromagnetic data set, each of which will be the focus of a presentation at a conference. At AGU in December, I will be showing comparisons of the airborne data to various ground-based geophyscs data sets (including NMR, electrical resistivity tomography, and seismic refraction tomography). This talk will focus on the usefulness of the airborne data for large-scale prospecting for hydrologic targets, but also on the importance of ground-based surveys to verify and increase data resolution. Finally, at SAGEEP in March, I will be presenting the airborne data with a more surface processes related slant. I am currently working on a geophysical classification code that should help remove some of the various lithologic effects in the data set. By doing so, we hope to identify large-scale spatial trends related to other variables, such as vegetation type, slope, or catchment area. If you will be at AGU or SAGEEP then I encourage you to come and ask me questions or give me input!
That’s all for now...
Cheers,
Ryan
Gearing up for Fall research
I’ve just finished a summer internship and am headed back up to Wyoming to get some field work done in the Snowy Range. Next week I will also be traveling out to the Eel Creek Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) with WyCEHG to collect geophysical data. Finally, after these two weeks of field work, I will be starting up classes again and working on my airborne research (including putting together a poster for AGU of my abstract is accepted). At AGU I will be presenting, the AEM data from my research as it compares to ground-based geophysical surveys collected in the Snowy Range this summer.