Week 1

This was the first week of my virtual internship at the Center for Air Transportation Systems Research at George Mason University. I had previously interned there last summer so returning to my internship was easy. Before starting we exchanged emails, and Sunday night I received my task. I was to collect data for one of their projects called contrail catcher, so I will be collecting data by observing how long contrails stay in the sky, their dissipation, length width, etc… With this data, I am expected to cross-reference it to atmospheric data in the atmosphere to draw certain conclusions.

My first task was to read their prior research on the subject and write a 1-2 page outline of what I will be doing for me to get a greater understanding of the project that I will be assisting in. This is what I did on the first few days of my internship. On Thursday I joined a seminar presented by Dr. Lance Sherry and a graduate student that is also working on the contrail catcher project, Amy Rose. The seminar was about the previous projects that I had read about so it was nice to see a more concise explanation of the papers that I had read.

The papers were really helpful for my background research for my final project since the papers were about mitigating the effects that contrails have on climate change. Having access to prior research in this area was really helpful for getting a better understanding of what my final product will look like.

I’m looking forwards to the coming weeks of my internship where I will begin collecting and analyzing contrail data.