Intern Research

2008-10-16 15:52:53.000 – Jordan Scampoli,  Summit Intern

I’ve given quite a few tours since my shift came back up yesterday to members from all over the world. One of the questions that continue to come up is how a math and economics graduate got an internship at the Mount Washington Observatory. The Observatory has long had a history of not only weather observation but also academic research.

In addition to living and playing on the summit, I have been putting my degree to work by doing research. Right now I am working on a project comparing temperature probes. In various places all over the Mount Washington Valley as well as the summits of Bretton Woods, Wildcat, Attitash, and some AMC huts, the Observatory has remote sensors constantly monitoring temperature and relative humidity with two different temperature probes. These sensors send information to our databases every minute.

My charge is to analyze the differences in the readings of the two probes and to see how accurate they are. This involves finding errors based on what the probe manufacturer states and applying them to the readings the probes send us.

Some of the differences I have found are due to normal “acceptable” errors and others are due to complete malfunctions. It is interesting to try and understand why the two probes will suddenly give slightly different readings for a period of time and then within a few minutes or hours come back into agreement. The hope of my project is to find a way to automatically flag when probes are giving different readings due to malfunction and not insignificant errors. That way we can send someone out (probably an intern) to try and fix the problem.

Jordan Scampoli,  Summit Intern