AGU Conference in San Francisco

Hello everyone at TREC!

Currently Liliana and I are in San Francisco to present our research projects from the REU program at the AGU Conference. The AGU conference is absolutely huge, 15,000 people interested in all things physical science related.

Me in front of my poster.

My poster session was apart of a session in which the focus was how hydrologic and climate change science is related to public policy. The talks for this session in the afternoon were very interesting in regards to how science is passed on from researchers to policy makers and public opinion and the difficulty that this often presents in terms of the desires of different stakeholders. Definitely very applicable to the aspects of extension work at TREC.

There were definitely people interested in the topics Liliana and I were working on. I got a few people stop by my poster who worked for companies who designed or manufactured soil moisture sensors, luckily not Campbell Scientific but they were there. It was interesting to see the problem from that perspective and making TDR sensors that work in sandy/rocky soils is a difficulty they face worldwide. It would be interesting to do a gravimetric calibration and see how that compares to the calibration equation I made. The use of eddy covariance systems in comparison to estimation equations also gathered quite a bit of interest as it applies to a lot of research topics that others were working on.

I have been rooming with a PhD student in the UF ABE program, Syewoon Hwang, who is working with Dr. Wendy Graham on downscaling Global Circulation Models using a novel approach. He has been great to room with and I learned a lot from him.

Liliana and I at the cable car museum.

We also found some time to see some of the city. Their is a lot going on in San Francisco. My hotel rented free bicycles so I rode around the city and to Golden Gate Bridge. Ill tell you, you don't realize how hilly San Francisco is until you try to bike up and down!

From left to right; June, Me, Liliana, and Melissa

Good memory from TREC! Picking Lychee with Milagros and Liliana.

Nicholas it looks like you did a lot of awesome stuff at the field site. The VBA program for data processing sounds very useful, I had visions of that when I was working on it but not the skills to put it together.

Happy holidays from San Francisco and hope all is well!

- Kevin