EAS Announces Launch of New Student Project Team

View from Balloon

Photo credit: Mike Hojnowski

Cornell Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS) will create their first student project team, CU GeoData, in the Fall of 2020. The team will be dedicated to assessing environmental conditions and trends using novel, autonomous instruments, and platforms – giving students real-world experience.

Project teams are a large part of the culture in the College of Engineering – mimicking real-world experiences by bringing together Cornell students, faculty, and staff to solve complex problems. Fieldwork is a large part of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences culture, making the new project team a perfect opportunity for EAS students in the College of Engineering, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences or the College of Arts & Sciences.

The team will develop instruments and techniques to be used to assess environmental conditions and trends by exploiting the revolution underway in instrumentation and platforms which can be used to probe the earth and its atmosphere.

The project will include in situ measurements of atmospheric composition and circulation made from balloons, remote sensing measurements of topography, vegetation, and water content made using synthetic aperture radars carried by drones, geochemical sampling at the earth's surface, and subsurface monitoring of heat and hydrologic transport using fiber optics deployed in local boreholes and mines.

The focus of the student project team would be on instrument design and development and on novel methods of analysis, rendering, and interpretation. Data from the instruments will be processed, analyzed, interpreted, and published by the team with peer review being the main means of validation.

The team will be advised by Toby Ault, Lou Derry, Patrick Fulton, Karin Olson Hoal, David Hysell, and Rowena Lohman – all faculty in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. The faculty have expertise in areas ranging from ground- and space-based remote sensing, subsurface instrumentation, balloon experiments, and commercial mining.

Students interested in joining the team should contact David Hysell at david.hysell@cornell.edu.

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