Thanks to the generosity of Jack and Laura Dangermond, multiple travel expense awards are available to help qualified undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of Geography to present GIS-related work at conferences and workshops. Calls for applications for Dangermond Travel Scholarships are usually made in August (Aug. 15-22) for the Fall Quarter, December (Dec. 15—22) for the Winter Quarter, and March (Mar. 15—22) for the Spring and Summer Quarters. Eight grad students, one new alumnus, and one undergrad successfully applied for funding for this year’s Fall Quarter.
Rodrigo Bombardi will be presenting a paper co-written with Leila Carvalho and Charles Jones at the American Geophysical Union (3-7 December, 2012; San Francisco, CA) titled “South Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature and its Relationship with Precipitation in Brazil During Neutral ENSO Periods.” Abstract: “The dominant mode of coupled variability over the South Atlantic Ocean is known as “South Atlantic Dipole” (SAD) and is characterized by a dipole in sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies with centers over the tropical and the subtropical South Atlantic. Previous studies have shown that variations in SST related to SAD modulate large-scale patterns of precipitation over the Atlantic Ocean. Here we show that variations in the South Atlantic SST strongly impact daily precipitation over central-eastern Brazil. Moreover, we examine the mechanisms whereby the South Atlantic SST anomalies influence the climate of the region…We expect that the results from this study will contribute to climate monitoring and forecasting.”
Forest Cannon will also be at the AGU, presenting a paper titled “Large-Scale Indian Summer Monsoon Index.” “Seasonal rainfall associated with the Indian summer monsoon is the primary water source for the central and eastern Himalaya, while the western Himalaya receives significant amounts of precipitation during the winter season…The objective task of this research is to develop detailed diagnostic analyses to characterize climatological variability of the summer monsoon system over high Asian mountains during 1979-present…Primarily, we apply a combined empirical orthogonal function to seasonal variations in circulation, temperature and moisture…The ability to better understand inter-annual variability in timing and amplitude carries important social and economic impacts as densely populated regions of southern Asia rely on associated seasonal precipitation for water for drinking, agriculture, and power generation.
Kate Deutsch will present a paper titled “Assessing the Importance of Subjective Place Attributes in Behavioral Choices” at GIScience 2012 (18-21 September, 2012; Columbus, OH). “This work is a portion of my dissertation in which I have conducted a web-based survey on spatial decision-making and attitudes with regard to Santa Barbara geography. This specific research examines data collected through a series of mapping questions. I am in the preliminary stage of this analysis, and this opportunity will provide me with excellent feedback to produce a paper for submission to a journal.”
Seth Gorelic just graduated and he will be presenting a Geography 115 poster he helped to create in his senior year at the AGU, titled “Measuring Glacial Change in the Mt. Tronador Region of the Southern Andes with Remote Sensing Techniques”: “Considering implications for policy formulation in water security and adaptation to climate change from local to intergovernmental scales, as atmospheric warming trends continue, it is imperative to quantify glacier behavior in this region. The objectives of this study were to (a) evaluate spatial-temporal variations of glaciers in the Mt. Tronador region of the Southern Andes from 1976 to 2007; (b) map changes in glacier extent; (c) evaluate changes in regional areas of vegetation, water bodies, bare earth, and glacier; and (d) evaluate regional temperature change.”
Shane Grigsby is also attending the AGU and will present “Sharing the Cloud: Showing, Distributing, and sharing large point datasets.” “I selected this conference because I was invited to apply by one of the co-chairs for a session sponsored by the ‘Earth and Space Science Informatics’ on open source scientific collaboration. I was invited based on a presentation, ‘LiDAR Visualization,’ that I gave last year at the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference in Denver.”
Grant McKenzie will be presenting “Groundtruthing spatial activities based on online social networking data” at GIScience 2012. “Recently, there has been considerable growth in the area of online social networking (OSN). In just six years, the social application Facebook has amassed over 900 million active users communicating in over 70 languages But how reliable is this information? From a geospatial perspective, what types of location information are being presented and at what resolution? And importantly, how accurate is the mentioned activity location in terms of real-world activities? This extended abstract presents the initial stages of ongoing study designed to answer these questions.”
Olaf Menzer will present “Gap-filling of flux measurements over a heterogeneous urban landscape” at the AGU. Partial abstract: “A small, but growing, number of urban flux towers measure surface-atmospheric exchanges of energy, water, and greenhouse gases by the eddy covariance method. Imputation of gaps in these measurements caused by low turbulence conditions and system failures is essential for obtaining annual sums of CO2 exchange and evaporation. Yet most gap-filling methods were designed for natural measurement sites such as forests and grasslands. In the urban environment, however, the assumptions on which those approaches are based are violated and well known temperature or light response models are not applicable because of urban footprint heterogeneity and localized CO2 emissions. Observation-based methods of machine learning can reveal intrinsic mechanisms by using inputs such as wind direction, footprint size, and continuous traffic data, making gap-filling results more accurate.”
Matthew Niblett will be attending the 59th Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Assn. International (6-10 November, 2012; Ottawa, Canada) where he will present “A new perspective in dispersive facility location modeling.” Matt selected this conference because he felt “it is an excellent venue to assess global state of the art research in the field of regional science. [My] talk will primarily focus on the way dispersion has been considered and modeled in the past, what is lacking, and a new model that captures dispersion in a more realistic way. Current literature only considers maximizing the number of facilities (say franchises) that maintain dispersion amongst themselves. However, maximizing the number of facilities may not always happen on the part of a franchise, as a competitor often constructs barriers to entry that effectively minimizes the total number of facilities that can be located over a landscape. The proposed model captures this minimization and discusses a way to solve and display this phenomenon, advancing the state-of-the-art representation of dispersion in GIS.
Colin Twohig, a UCSB senior majoring in Geography with an emphasis in GIS, will be attending the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (14-17 October, 2012; Los Angeles, CA) and presenting a paper titled “Impure Public Good Consumption: A Field Experiment.” “Research has been conducted on consumer responses to different types of marketing messages for electricity sourced from ‘green’ fuels such as solar energy and wind turbines, and this research attempts to add empirical evidence through a controlled experiment conducted at the UC Santa Barbara Family Housing facilities. I seek to determine the difference in frequency and contribution of composted material based on the underlying motivation of the consumer in conjunction with the marketing materials used.”
Yingjie-Hu will attend GIScience 2012 and present a paper titled “Using spatial-temporal signatures to infer human activities from personal trajectories on location-enabled mobile devices.” He will present preliminary research about “using spatial-temporal signatures to infer human activities from personal trajectories recorded on location-enabled mobile devices. Human activities, which always take place under a particular context, have their own spatial-temporal patterns (called signatures), and such signatures can be learned and extracted. In this research, we conducted a survey to extract activity signatures, and proposed a method to infer human activities from the personal trajectories recorded on location-enabled mobile devices through the analysis of spatial-temporal signatures. The inferred activities can be employed as central nodes to organize personal information, and the spatial-temporal stamps of the activities can be utilized to index the information items, thereby facilitating information retrieval and management. As a proof-of-concept, we also developed two versions of prototypes (a web version and a mobile version) to demonstrate our idea.”
.jpg)
