Week 9

Hello there. This week was spent back outside as the weather cleared up. Summer is definitely on the way as I could finally put on my shorts and enjoy the warm weather while taking pictures of contrails (again). In addition to my contrail catching activities, I also worked on creating the relative humidity vs contrail duration graph that Dr. Sherry wanted me to make. At first, I wasn’t really sure about the definition of contrail duration, I thought that it could mean, time or the length of the contrail. Ultimately I decided to use time as a metric after receiving clarification. Unfortunately, I had not previously recorded how many seconds the contrail persisted so I had to resort to going through my old pictures and looking at how long the contrails were and I had to reverse engineer how long the contrail had persisted. This does take some time so I haven’t yet gotten through all of my pictures. In addition to this project, Amy also gave me some additional work to do on Wednesday. She wanted me to assist with her ongoing project which is related to analyzing photographs of contrails. There is an online database of aerial photos called AVIRIS which is a product of NASA’s collaboration with JPL at CalTech. What Amy wanted me to do was to search through this database to find photos that had contrails in them so that she would work on analyzing them. This was a relatively straightforward task yet it was still very repetitive, I had to scour through hundreds of photographs just in order to find a handful of photos that had contrails in them. These weren’t as common as I had initially thought as well, and it took me a few hours even to find my first dozen of photos. Another issue was that a lot of the photographs were stacked on top of each other on the map which made it difficult to go through all of them, however, it was possible to do so. So far if found around 15 photos that have contrails in them and I expect to continue my search next week. Looking forwards to updating you in the coming days.