Cohort Level: Cohort - V

Career Goal: I want to first go to graduate school and earn my PhD. With my PhD, I want to either join a government research firm or work at a research institution so that I can also have the ability to teach.

Expected Graduation Date: May 26, 2022

Degree: B.S Physics

Research Title: Obtaining Accurate Extinction and Backscatter Coefficients Using Ceilometers

Research Synopsis: I have proposed a method to smooth the average-backscatter power data collected by ceilometers, which are often impacted with photon noise in later parts of the day. The results of my method produced more observably distinct atmospheric layers compared to the results of Savitzky-Golay filtering. I am now working to restructure a MATLAB script in order to the extinction and backscatter coefficients which indicate the characteristics of the aerosols. The goal is to apply my filtering script to this data and compare the results to Savitzky-Golay filtering in order to determine which method will allow us to obtain the most accurate aerosol parameters.