Estevan Munguia

August 2nd, 2021

This week I will be reflecting on my experience throughout this internship.

When I first heard that I would be working for a national laboratory (PNNL) I was really excited. Other summer internships I have had in the past were at universities and the work was largely academic in nature. However, at a national lab the work done has more practicle applications and societal impacts. Alas, because of COVID-19 the internship had to be moved online and I didn’t get a chance to visit the lab in person. Still, I have formed a good relationship with my mentors and have learned a lot, both big picture stuff as well as technical things.

One noteworthy thing that happend this summer is my feelings on coding. To be perfectly frank, I was not a fan of coding. It can be confusing and frustrating at times. However, I knew how vital it was to, not only a career in seismology, but many other career paths. Now, though, I can almost say that I enjoy coding. There is some weird satisfaction from writing code, troubleshooting errors, creating graphs and talking to the computer to have it do something you want. Now that I have a basic knowlege of how to write scripts, I can use other tools after the conclusion of this internship to further devolop those skills. Linkedin Learning is a platform that I regualrly use to learn new skills and will be one of many resoures I will use in the future. 

July 29th, 2021

I think the biggest challenge I have faced this summer is dealing with the MATLAB code that I have been working with to analyze the data set I am using. Although I had used MATLAB before, I came in with very minimal experience and so it was a steep learning curve to be able to understand the scripts that were given to me and what they were actually doing. In fact I was so reluctant to work with code that I almost picked a slightly different project to avoid doing so. However, once I started to analyze the code, write my own comments, and really do a deep dive into every line I didn't understand, I began to understand it more clearly. In fact, when it came time for me to write some code for myself, I realized that I had learned more than I expected. I began writing some complicated lines of code with various nested for loops intertwined. Now I feel like my coding skills have grown exponentially and I feel like I am on a different level and can tackle more difficult problems in MATLAB. 

July 14th, 2021

Although I am only just getting started with data analysis, my colleagues and I have managed to produce some nice charts that I have shown below. In coda wave interferometry we compare two signals to eachother in order to compute thier similarity. I will discuss more about this below where I summarize a relavent paper that goes into this topic in much greater detail. However, we can get an idea of the similarities between two signals by looking at the charts below. What you are looking at below are the following: the bottom most chart are two signals laid on top of each other. Notice though that you can only really see one of them, the yellow one. That's because the two signals are very similar, so they overlap quite a lot. One of the signals is from the first time stamp and the second signal is several minutes later. They are very similar because the hydro fracking has not happend yet. The middle chart is how much we need to stretch the second signal to match up with the first signal. And the top chart is how closely those signals match up. The first part of the signal the correlation coefficient is close to 1, which means the signals are a near perfect match. But later on the signals begin to differ, which is why the correlation coefficient begins to spike down.

Probably the most important paper related to this project I have read so far is Azzola et al, 2017. In this paper they discuss the method of how we comare two signals to each other. Essentially you stretch one of the signals by some factor epsilon and calculate how well it matches with the reference signal by cross correlating them. That epsilon value is what is shown in the middle graph. You can see that in our case the perturbed signal does not have to be stretched much.

June 29th, 2021

Although this internship has been a great experience thus far, there are some challenges and frustrations that I have come across. The biggest source of frustration has been the lack of clarity of what my specific project will be. So far I have done a lot of background reading but the details of my project have yet to be finalized. With about 6 1/2 weeks left in my internship it feels like I am behind some of the other interns that are already working with data.

On a positive note, I feel like I have a much better grasp of the background of my project. I also feel like I am getting a better sense of what working for a national lab feels like. That's good because permanent work at a lab may be something that I do in the future.

Below is a map of where the data I will be working with is coming from. The site is the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, SD. This is the site where EGS Collab is conducting thier experiment. I made this map with ESRI ArcGIS.

June 24th, 2021

The elevator pitch was a bit difficult to draft because it is was not easy to give a accurate description of my project without giving a lengthy background explanation about why it matters. For an elevator speech of under one minute it was important that I only included broad information an not get bogged down with minor details.

Since my project (dealing with geothermal energy) has applications beyond academia this speech would be useful in a variety of venues besides AGU. Policy makers and government officials should be very interesest in the future of renewable energy resources as we try to limint the amount of fossil fuel combustion we are generating. 

Generating short but concise speeches are important when introducing your work to other people that you might encounter in your career without having to go too into the weeds. It is not always necessary or appropriate to give long drawn out speeches to someone who is curious about your work, so a "to the point" speech might be all that is required to make a connection. 

June 15th, 2021

This summer I will be working with open source data from openei.org. Anyone who wishes can access this data and is freely available to the public. Within OpenEI there is geothermal data repository that stores much of the data I will be utilizing. The data comes from several entities that are working on geothermal projects across the nation and are funded by the department of energy such as FORGE and EGS Collab.

One of the skills that I would like to improve on this summer is using software to analyze data and present it in a graphical form. Computing skills are essential in STEM and particularly in seismology so it is vital that I become familiar with some of the common programs geoscientists use. I am currently reading a intro MATLAB book to familiarize myself with one such program.

June 9th, 2021

Geothermal energy currently accounts for only about 0.4 percent of the total energy produced in the US each year. Yet many scientists believe it can be much greater than this. As a clean energy source, geothermal is one possible alternative to fossil fuel combustion, which is unsustainable in the long term. One obstacle preventing the scaling of geothermal is availability of reservoirs. Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) is one possible solution which would allow scientists to tap into previously unavailable resources. EGS uses unconventional techniques, such as hydraulic fracking to create subsurface fractures by which hot water can more easily flow through. This project's goals are to help EGS Collab in their efforts to understand how we can use EGS to harness the vast energy available in the Earth’s warm interior.