This fall has been busy!
The culmination of the term was at the annual American Geophysical Union conference in Washington, DC. The conference is a nexus for physical scientists in a variety of subjects. At the meeting, our graduate student Alli presented both a talk and a poster.
The talk, Quantifying changes in global lake surface area over 20 years (1995-2015) in relation to climate and human population, focused on trends in global lake surface area for over 1.3 million lakes. This work used the new Global Lake Area, Climate, and Population data set which graduate students from our lab, and our sister lab the Hampton Lab, have been developing. The data set combines HydroLAKES and HydroBASINS data sets with the JRC Global Surface Water data set to obtain annual permanent and seasonal surface areas for individual lakes >10 ha. Yearly basin-level 2-meter air temperature averages and total and average precipitation data were derived from MERRA-2 reanalysis data. Population data, also calculated to the basin level, came from the Gridded Population of the World data set. The talk was in a session devoted to remote sensing of surface waters. Lots of work is being done in this area, with many new data products and techniques in development.
The poster was focused on the successes and lessons from our R and Python Working Groups. Alli founded and runs the R Working Group here at WSU. The poster, Fostering cross-disciplinary research relationships through a common analytic language, focused on how analytic languages such as R and Python can help provide a shared vocabulary for researchers from different disciplines. The R and Python groups represent a bottom-up approach to developing interdisciplinary relationships.