For the second time in as many days, an RUCOOL graduate student has completed her thesis. Ailey Sheehan successfully defended her Master’s Thesis “Developing an Open-Source Analysis Pipeline For a Glider-Based Acoustic Zooplankton Fish Profiler (AZFP)” in our Master’s in Operational Oceanography program! Congrats, Ailey!

Julia Engdahl, recent RUCOOL Masters in Oceanography graduate, won the NOAA Professional Excellence Award during her first year as a contractor for NOAA CO-OPS (Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services). NOAA CO-OPS Director, Richard Edwing, said the following: This award provides recognition for outstanding accomplishment in furthering CO-OPS’ mission through exceptional dedication or innovative approaches to their work while advancing morale among fellow employees. The Individual Award for Professional Excellence goes to: Julia Engdahl, OD (Lynker) Julia is being recognized for the professional excellence she has demonstrated in her first year as a Lynker contractor with CO-OPS. Her diverse contributions to CO-OPS and NOAA include providing quality control of water level and currents data; supporting the weekly Gain and Offset Backup Analysis, or GOBA, report; sharing her impressive coding skills; innovating product and process improvements; assisting with Software Carpentry workshops; and serving as the Executive Secretariat for NOAA AI Executive Committee and the Coordinator for the NOS AI Working Group. Julia’s leadership and support of CO-OPS CODE team activities has been exemplary. She has eagerly shared her skills with others and led and collaborated on multiple innovative coding projects; like converting microwave water level comparison scripts to Python, and bringing creativity to the Santa Monica Digital Display Project. One of Julia’s best known contributions to CO-OPS is her use of animated GIFs for the representation of water level and sea level trend data. Julia’s accomplishments are extensive and impressive, but even more so when considering that she was hired only 13 months ago – during the pandemic and without the benefits of in-person training, guidance, or collaboration. We are thankful to have you on board and looking forward to even more innovation. Congratulations Julia!

RUCOOL grad student Ted Thompson successfully presented his Thesis in our Master’s in Operational Oceanography program this morning titled “Best Practices for Sea-Bird Scientific deep ISFET-based pH sensor integrated into a Slocum Webb Glider”. Congrats, Ted! He’s moving on soon to a position at the U.S. Geological Survey, so we wish him well!

Last week our glider guru Nicole Waite was out with our grad students Ted and Ailey, and our Rutgers RIOS undergrads Becca and Jocelyn on a dual glider deployment off of Tuckerton NJ. Capt. Chip Haldeman took the crew out on the R/V/ Arabella to deploy gliders MARACOOS02 and RU30. MARACOOS02 will be focusing on studying the effects on the ocean from passing tropical storms this summer (funded through MARACOOS) and RU30 will be studying pH trends off NJ (funded by NOAA). Of course, both gliders will gather plenty of info on temperature, oxygen, currents, water visibility etc, all of which is available for viewing on our RUCOOL glider pages.

Congratulations to Joe Anarumo who successfully presented his Masters work on Wednesday. Joe is a member of the first cohort of the Operational Oceanography masters program. During his time in DMCS Joe became an expert in using open-source drifter simulation code. His thesis plugged local observational resources into the drifter simulation code OpenDrift to create an easy to use tool for tracking things floating in the mid-Atlantic bight. His thesis, “An Open-Source Software Application for Drifter Trajectory Prediction in the Mid-Atlantic Bight” has been submitted for presentation at the Marine Technology Society annual conference. Joe will bring his data skills to his new role as an Environmental Science Analyst at Sage Services where he will help run data analysis for the Water Quality Compliance Modeling Program for the watershed of Philadelphia. Congrats Joe!!

Congratulations to Julia Engdahl who successfully defended her Masters thesis! Part of the first cohort of DMCS’ new program in Operational Oceanography, Julia has developed deep expertise in observing systems and cutting edge ocean data processing. Her thesis developed and tested algorithmic and machine learning approaches to analyzing underwater video. This work, “Developing an automated analysis of fish migration video using computer vision algorithms”, has been submitted to the Marine Technology Society OCEANS conference. Julia will put her degree to work in her new role as an Oceanographic Data Specialist at Lynker Technologies, where she will process and analyze water level and current data for NOAA’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services. Congrats Julia!

Over the last week, our graduate students got some hands on field work in the mid-Atlantic. On October 25th, Jackie Veatch, Joe Anarumo and Julia Engdahl deployed RU28 for its NJDEP funded water quality testing mission along the NJ coast. This glider mission, deployed by the all-grad-student crew, can be tracked here: Gliders In addition, on November 1, Joe and Julia accompanied CODAR aficionado, Ethan Handel, on mission to upgrade the HF-Radar antenna at Sandy Hook, NJ. Our HF-Radar systems support numerous research projects, but are also used by the US Coast Guard to support Search and Rescue operations throughout the Mid Atlantic. More information about these systems can be found here: CODAR Thanks to Julia, Joe and Jackie for supporting a successful week of field operations!