Second Birthday Saturday of the REU

Today I spent another day at the barn processing data. I finally found some downloadable temperature data, although it wasn’t even collected in the Valley. Kualoa Ranch headquarters had kept a record of daily temperature, and so I downloaded the daily record for all of 2011. From there, I reduced the tables into monthly averages, and created 12 monthly rasters of the entire study area, of which every grid cell was comprised of he same value. Although this was not the most desirable result, it did allow me to go ahead and run the Water Balance Toolset. With all the data I needed, I ran through the steps and was able to achieve maps of monthly actual evapotranspiration (AET), potential evapotranspiration (PET), soil water storage, deficit, and surplus, annual AET, and annual PET. It was satisfying to finally have some results to work with.

After I completed this, the group met up to discuss our progress so far with our individual projects. It was nice to hear what everyone had been up to this week, especially when I had spent the last two days in the barn. After the discussion, we were set free, so to speak, and told that we had time off until Monday morning. The rest of the evening was spent celebrating Cole’s brithday, which was fun.