My Trip to AGU 2008

In December 2008, I traveled to San Francisco, for the Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). This was a huge conference, with over 16,000 attendees, one of who was me. I was an exhibitor, as I did demonstrations in the CUAHSI booth.

CUAHSI is the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, an organization that works with many universities and develops technologies for retrieving and analyzing hydrological data from rivers and streams in the U.S. They release CUAHSI Water Data Services also called WaterOneFlow services. These are free web services that CUAHSI uses to collect hydrologic data from different scientific organizations and release them in an easy to access format. With these services, you can learn what hydrologic variables are measured at different stations, and get the measurement values.

During the weekend before the conference, I programmed a web application that demonstrated how easy it is to use CUAHSI WaterOneFlow services. The application found all the hydrological stations from US Geological Survey in the San Francisco area, plotted them on a map, and when a user clicked on a station, the program found daily discharge information for it, for the last 30 days, and displayed it in a graph. River discharge is a measure of how much water flows down a river or stream at a certain point. This measure can be affected by rain, wind, terrain, and other elements. Then a user could also request a map of precipitation for the same area, from a NEXRAD service. Looking at both precipitation and discharge, you can see how they are related.

Downloads

I coded the web application in ASP.NET C#, and HTML with some Javascript and CSS added on. I also used OpenLayers (for mapping), Google Chart (for showing discharge plots), and WMS (to show NEXRAD). Click here to download the source code. To build the code, you will need Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 2.0 installed.

To run the demonstration on the internet, follow this link to the demo.

Click here to see the PowerPoint demonstration.

To see the picture gallery, click here (http://picasaweb.google.com/maximz.tripphotos/AGU2008)

Demonstrations at the AGU meeting

We stayed at the Hotel Whitcomb in San Francisco. It was a pretty cheap, but comfortable, hotel, although my parents disliked it. However, it was fairly close to the AGU conference center and also to Union Square in Downtown San Francisco. This relative proximity created lots of opportunities for me to get beautiful or cool pictures, like the one on the right, which shows a fountain near City Hall (a more conventional view of this fountain is here. As a side note, I really love photography. If you get a chance, see some of my pictures and vote for them on DPChallenge.com).

The day after my family and I flew in was my first day at AGU 2008. My dad’s friend managed to get me an exhibitor nametag, so that conference officials would let me do demos at the booth. Once this happened, we went to set up my demonstration equipment and connect to the Internet, which took a while. Afterwards, attendees began walking throughout the exhibit hall, and I had a lot of visitors on the first day. Some of them were important people in the field of hydrology. One of my first visitors was Dr. Robert Hirsch, Associate Director for Water at the United States Geological Survey, who also works with CUAHSI. You can see a picture of this demo on the left.

Here are some more pictures of the demonstrations that I made. The one on the right is my demonstration for Professor David Maidment, from the University of Texas, Austin, and Drs. Don Cline and John Halquist from the National Weather Service.

Another of my demonstrations of the easiness of use of CUAHSI WaterOneFlow services was for Dr. Bora Beran from Microsoft Research, who also worked with CUAHSI on WaterOneFlow and related services (see the picture on the left).

I conducted demonstrations for three days. My last demonstration was for Dr. Alex Talalayevsky, from the Consortium of Ocean Leadership at Washington DC. Also on the picture are Tom Whitenack from San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Dr. Tim Whiteaker from University of Texas, Austin.

I really enjoyed doing demonstrations at AGU because I got to learn more about hydrology and programming, but also had a lot of fun. Also, our booth happened to be located right across from the Google booth, where I spent a lot of quality time asking questions about Google Earth and 3D modeling. As it turns out, the main technique for showing many polygon features in Google Earth is to apply what Google people call “regionation”, or the ability to display only those objects that are important to show at each level of detail, instead of showing all objects.

See this gallery for more pictures from the AGU.

After AGU was over, my family and I were walking around San Francisco, and stopped to eat dinner at a jazz bistro. There was a band playing there, and I asked them whether I could play a song or two during their break. After consulting with the owner, the musicians allowed me to play All Blues, a jazz song by Miles Davis, on the piano. The musicians caught on to the beat after I started playing, and accompanied me on the drums, bass, and saxophone throughout the tune. It was a very thrilling experience for me, as I’ve never been accompanied before while playing a jazz tune. Here is the video

Winter Break Travel: Lake Tahoe

After the AGU conference in San Francisco ended, my family and I traveled to Lake Tahoe over the beginning of Winter Break. During the winter, there is a lot of snow in Lake Tahoe, and this year was no exception. This caused some problems, such as figuring out how to drive in the snow, but also enjoyment, such as skiing and having snowball fights.

We stayed in a very cozy cabin in a Lake Tahoe motel called the Cedar Glen Lodge. There was a sledding hill very close to us, where we went on our first day. It turned out that there was also cheap snowmobile rental there, so we tried it out.

Riding on a snowmobile was very fun. At first, it was scary, especially going down the steep hill and gliding over the many bumps, but after a few tries, I got the hang of it, and even tried to go as fast as possible a few times. Later, we went skiing backcountry, but I’m not very good at skiing, so we didn’t get far.

The next day, we drove to the Lake Tahoe Cross-Country Skiing Resort, where there were trails overlooking the lake. That day, I was more successful at skiing than before, probably due to the grooming of the trails. We went on an easy trail, without lots of steep climbs or harsh declines, thus we enjoyed ourselves as we skied through what appeared to be a winter wonder world. Around us stood lots of evergreens, resembling a wood, and snow drifted down peacefully from the clouds.

Overall, my trip was very interesting and exciting, with lots of learning opportunities within.