Research and Hikes
Research has been very rewarding lately. Oscar introduced Jon and I to Jaime from the engineering department. Jaime originally worked on a program to perform earth tide corrections and topographic corrections. Jaime was only able to get to perform earth tide corrections on data and our task is to understand how he did it and to replicate it in a more efficient way then create a program for the topographic corrections. We also spent a lot of time scouring through research papers to find earth tide models that can help us model the changes in gravity. It was very stressful because we could not find working software that we could use readily. Most things were not user-friendly.
On Thursday, we had a holiday so we went hiking with Krista to Pico Blanco. The hike was 12 km but it was easily the hardest hike I have ever done. It was seven hours of pain and a test of endurance and will. The downhill portion of the hike was very stressful in that slipping and falling was not fun. Having fallen many times on the way down, I was not a happy camper. I am so glad that the hike is over and I can look forward to going back out to the field tomorrow to do more gravity measurements.
