Projects

Valero Texas Open

The Valero Texas Open is one of the oldest tournaments on the PGA Tour. Following the 2012 tournament, I created an image gallery to show off pictures from the tour and associated events. The easiest way for the client to upload and manage their media was to employ a separate Flickr account. There, they organized and tagged their images as they saw fit. All media was later pulled into the site via cron job requests to the Flickr API. Once published, the imagery would automatically be grouped into the proper album.

Wedding Site

The site I designed for my wedding featured a simple photo gallery and a Google maps interface that gave quick driving directions between draggable start and end points. All wedding locations were overlaid. Users could easily zoom to these locations by touching upon the icons in the top legend.

Task Manager

The task manager is primarily driven by PHP. It makes calls to a purpose-built, normalized MySQL back-end. Following a secure login an individual user may easily submit, track, edit, archive, and delete tasks organized by project and priority. Administrators may assign access privileges to both users and projects. I use this tool daily to keep myself organized, so it is under constant development. New features under development include a search bar, optional due dates, and email reminders if an unfinished task is overdue.

Adapt Training

Adapt Training is a fitness facility dedicated to using the latest advances in training and physical therapy. Their computer programming needs were twofold: 1) an objective method of scoring exercise movements using a rubric designed by the head trainer for the purpose of assigning workouts, and 2) a method to share with the client (with username and password via a large database) their custom workout. These tasks had to be wrapped into an accessible, easy-to-use interface. I used MySQL, Perl (CGI), and JavaScript to implement a form-based approach via web-browser.

The Greenwood School

Parents of autistic children are limited to the general educational tools that work for everyone else. Some programs are too rudimentary. Some are too advanced. Nearly all programs ramp up too quickly from one question to another. As autism is a highly variable neurodevelopmental disorder, educational tools work most effectively when tailored to a particular case.

3D Artillery Game

I recalled an old turn-based two-player computer game where players took turns firing missiles at each other’s base. You would specify the angle of fire and the game would trace out the path of the projectile through the air as gravity pulled it down to the surface to explode. It was a two-dimensional game that would randomly seed base positions atop varying topography. I set for myself the goal of coding this game in three dimensions. As a classically trained meteorologist, I also added air resistance and random wind fields.

Public

Thesis

This was a study that examined the effect of the Appalachian Mountains on the precipitation distribution of tropical cyclones that impinge upon them. With the help of my advisor, Anantha Aiyyer, I began by classifying the 28 storms that passed through our study area between 1979 and 2006 into four general track types. I analyzed the track composites resulting, examined individual case studies, and ran numerical simulations with topography (control) and without (experimental) to isolate the effects of the Appalachians.

Climate Modeling

Using the R programming language with a gridded soil moisture dataset spanning the years 1950-2004, I attempted to correlate historical periods of flooding against a field-tested empirical orthogonal function (EOF: a statistical decomposition method relating the spatial distribution of a variable with its time series) showing zonal (east-west) hurricane track shifts through time as determined by Xie et al. (2005). The goal was to find how much of this flooding was due to hurricane activity.

Numerical Model

In a class taught by Dr. Matthew Parker, I was required to code a numerical model and later use it for a mesoscale (ie: greater in extent than storm-scale) scientific experiment. I first hardwired flux form advection, leapfrog time differencing, and lateral sponge boundaries into the code. I later added Asselin filtering, artificial diffusion, Rayleigh dampening, and Kessler microphysics.

Boundary Conditions

Unless your model domain is of global scale, you must choose some artificial boundary where your model-grid ends. Boundaries are areas of discontinuity that can negatively affect numerical solutions. Fortunately, there are methods available that serve to limit the detrimental effects these discontinuities can have on model results.

Here is a brief discussion of some of the boundary conditions commonly employed in atmospheric models. These are periodic, rigid, dampened, and sponge boundaries.