Projects: R

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.

A team project where money was no object, our task was to design a custom Doppler radar system for the greater Boston area. We determined the bounds of our system by studying the dominant weather patterns of the region and a selection of severe weather case studies. For both the extreme events, and the more typical conditions, the challenge was to strike a balance between output sounding resolution and update speed, between creating research-grade products and maintaining everyday functionality.