Anna Murphree, 2020 NASA Goddard Space Center Intern

Biography

SPS Chapter: Rhodes College

I am a rising senior at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. I am pairing my physics major with minors in mathematics and philosophy. Through working in our on-campus observatory and in various research groups, I have developed a passion for astrophysics that I hope to continue into graduate school. My dream career would probably involve working in an observatory before becoming a professor of astronomy. I am excited to explore new research with NASA this summer!

Outside of academics, our SPS chapter has had a huge impact on my college experience. I have loved doing local outreach and building fun demonstrations, and I look forward to being our chapter’s president next year. I also help run our Philosophy Club and our newly-founded Women in STEM club. At home, I love watching films, reading philosophy, and taking care of my plants.

Internship

Host: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Project

Abstract

Extreme precipitation events (EPEs) can cause natural hazards such as flooding and landslides. To better predict these events and avoid hazards, this study aimed to identify controlling mechanisms of EPEs. Previous work generated a database of EPEs from the Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) dataset for the continental US (CONUS). This study developed code to characterize these events with meteorological variables from the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA-2) dataset. Variables such as humidity, wind speed, and temperature were collected at time steps before, during, and after the events. The study looked for correlations between these meteorological variables and characteristics of the EPEs, such as intensity, duration, and total accumulation. Further work is necessary to determine which variables best characterize EPEs. The study also computed seasonal trends of wind speeds over CONUS from 1980 to 2019 and found that the decreasing horizonal wind speed might be responsible for the decreasing propagation of short duration EPEs in the summer season.

Final Presentation

Internship Blog

Week 1: Goals

[All views are my own.]

Hello! This is Anna, and I’m one of the NASA interns this summer. Briefly, I’m a senior physics major at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. I am very excited and grateful to be part of this program this summer!

What a time to be an intern! The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly brought us into unprecedented times. While I know we all wish we could be together in DC, I am very grateful to SPS and NASA for making this internship happen virtually. Monday, we kicked things off with an SPS orientation via Zoom. It was great to meet my fellow interns and program coordinators while learning about our summer plans. I also had NASA-wide and Goddard orientations, which made me even more excited to work in such a large and diverse scientific collaboration.

I was originally going to be doing a more hands-on project in the Observational Cosmology lab, which was not possible remotely. Luckily, I will be remotely researching extreme precipitation events (EPEs) with Dr. Yaping Zhou instead. I am very excited to learn about meteorological data analysis, as all my previous research has been in astronomy. I feel a bit like an astronomer masquerading as an earth scientist! Fortunately, a lot of the Python coding skills I have learned are transferring over. I have been writing lots of code this week, trying to characterize EPEs with various meteorological variables in the massive MERRA-2 dataset. Next week, I will be receiving a laptop from NASA that will allow me to use a supercomputer (!!) to work with these huge amounts of data. I have a lot to learn, and I am excited to get into it.

Outside of coding, I have been able to attend NASA-sponsored Lunch and Learn webinars, with topics ranging from how to use Teams effectively to the newest spacesuits. I also called in to my first-ever telecon with the interns of Goddard’s Code 600 science division. Wednesday, I played my first-ever Jackbox games with the other SPS interns and learned that I am not a good liar! I’m excited to get to know my fellow interns better, both at SPS and NASA.

Finally, it would feel insincere to omit what has been on my mind all week, namely the ongoing protests against police brutality taking place across the country and around the world. I have been sending my thoughts and donations to these activists and organizations, and I will continue to do so. Along with my scientific goals for this summer, I aim to better educate myself on the racial inequalities in this country.

Week 2: Shutdown

[All views are my own.]

Hello again! It’s wild to think we’re already two weeks into our internship; these months of social distancing have definitely made time feel relative. (For a great philosophical and physics-y read about time, I highly recommend The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli!)

This week, I kept working on my code to analyze extreme precipitation events (EPEs). I figured out how to make a lot of nice maps of wind speed, humidity, and more. My current task is figuring out how to write this data into a .nc file, a data format I had not worked with before 2 weeks ago. I will figure it out and then start running some statistics to correlate EPE characteristics with meteorological variables!

I also started a Python class that NASA is offering to their interns, which is quite strange for me. Don’t tell the grad schools I’m applying to in the fall, but I haven’t taken any formal coding classes yet! I have taught myself Python through various research projects, which inevitably leads to some gaps in my knowledge. Hopefully this class will help fill those in and give me more context for the coding I use all the time.

I got to know some of my fellow interns better this week, both at NASA and SPS. We had a Code 600 (NASA-speak for their science division) meet ‘n’ greet, where they gave us a brief introduction to all the cool science done at Goddard. They have hundreds of scientists studying everything from our climate to the cosmic microwave background! I joined a group chat with many of the Goddard interns, and I am excited to be part of such a diverse group of researchers. I also got to chat with some of the other SPS interns on Friday and I am happy to report that they are just as nerdy and charming as you’d expect!

Outside of this internship, protests against police brutality have continued around the globe. I appreciate AIP and SPS for taking part in the #ShutDownSTEM strike on Wednesday and encouraging us to examine the history of racism in STEM and beyond. Here’s a great article by one of the strike’s organizers: https://chanda.substack.com/p/what-i-wanted-when-i-called-for-a (I also highly recommend following Dr. Prescod-Weinstein on Twitter). I made sure to make time for reading and watching works by Black creators; I am currently working on In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe. As it is also Pride month, I want to acknowledge how important it is that this BLM movement is intersectional. Black trans women, famously Marsha P. Johnson, have always been at the front of queer rights movements and still face increased rates of violence. We have so much work to do, but the recent outpouring of support for the trans community is promising.

Week 3: Supercomputing

[All views are my own.]

I know everyone said that time would fly in this internship, but now I really believe them! Week 3 has come and gone and things are starting to get a lot busier.

I spent a lot of this week working on my analysis code, and I have some preliminary scatter plots to show for it. I’m working with some small subsets of the data, so they’re pretty sparse; they will definitely fill up when I start working with the years of precipitation events in these databases. My exciting news for this week: I received my laptop from NASA! Now I’ll be able to use Teams for meetings, access my very own NASA email (!!), and run my code on a supercomputer (!!!). I’m very excited to work with a whole bunch of data next week!

I’ve kept attending NASA’s various events, including their very helpful Python classes. I had never used Google’s Colab before and it is super convenient for coding lessons. On Friday, we had a Code 600 intern “meet ‘n’ greet,” where we got to learn about some of the other interns from all around the country. I also got to hear NASA’s LGBTAC talk from Dr. Martine Rothblatt, a businesswoman and advocate with a very impressive resume! It was inspiring to hear about her journey as a trans woman through the various fields she’s worked in, from satellite communications to biotechnology.

We also had some fun SPS events this week! Our first colloquium, from Dr. Toni Sauncy at TLU, reminded me that it’s important to keep the fun in your physics degree and wherever your career goes afterwards. I put this into practice a bit this week, as I’ve been testing out a tiny fire tornado (do not attempt inside!) for our intern demo competition. We also had some virtual intern hangouts and a happy hour with the SPS Exec board, all of which involved some wonderfully terrible physics puns.

Outside of this internship, I’ve been working on my routine and trying to keep up with the news. I got a new plant from a friend, picked up some new books from a local bookstore, and took a quick trip to Arkansas while taking out the recycling. If you’re ever in Memphis, I highly recommend driving over the Mississippi and blasting your favorite tunes (currently Noname). Till next week,

Week 4: Relax

[All views are my own.]

We are a whole month in! Time flies when you’re remotely interning at NASA during a social uprising during a pandemic.

This week I figured out how to use a supercomputer! I am running my codes on a ton of data and making a whole lot of scatter plots. We’re looking for correlations between meteorological variables and extreme precipitation events, which for now means scattering them against each other and seeing what matches up. I did have to spend a while on the phone with NASA’s IT department to get things running, but they were very nice and didn’t even mind my roommate’s cat yelling in the background (her name is Olive Oil and she has a lot to say). I don’t feel like I’ve made as much progress as I would like in this project, but that is a very imposter-y way to think! Research is a weird and winding process, especially during a pandemic, and doing my best is enough.

We had some cool physics events this week! On Wednesday, I tuned into APS’s Making Physics Inclusive and Equitable talk. While I think it’s important that they had this event and started these conversations, I know we have a long way to go to actually making physics (and all of academia) equitable. We also had a networking workshop with the APS Careers Program Manager Midhat Farooq, who gave us a ton of useful networking tips. I will definitely be using some of those as I start applying to graduate programs!

I am finding it really important to find ways to relax. I am very grateful and privileged to have a paid, remote internship; still, it has been a stressful couple months for everybody. On Friday, us SPS interns got together and watched the incredibly inaccurate film The Core, which I would highly recommend for some laughs. I’ve also been going on (socially distant) walks, reading, and trying to build a tiny fire tornado that won’t burn down my apartment. I’ll keep you updated.

Happy Pride and please wear your masks,

Week 5: Becoming

[All views are my own.]

Somehow we are halfway through this internship! There’s a Bon Jovi reference in there somewhere, but I’m too proud to make it.

This week, I spent a lot of time refining my codes and then running them on the supercomputer. Turns out, no matter how much you refine your code, working with huge amounts of data takes a while. I am excited to be learning how to work with a lot of data, especially in our “era of big data.” I was talking to my particle physics friend and he told me that the LHC will produce ~500TB of data per second in 2025! Crazy. I’m hopefully going to graduate school for astronomy, and I know that data processing is a super important skill to have.

Speaking of graduate school, I also spent some time this week looking through different programs. Like any good physicist, I have a detailed spreadsheet going. There are a ton of different factors that will go into this decision, and I’ve been trying to narrow down my list of schools. I have found Twitter to be surprisingly helpful, as many graduate students and young professors stay connected that way. I will be practicing some virtual networking soon because I realized that it is already July!

Outside of coding and spreadsheets, I have been experimenting in the kitchen lately. I got some fresh local produce from our lovely and socially distant Memphis farmer’s market, and I realized that the oven is my friend. Roasting veggies is so easy! I roasted kale for the first time ever and felt like I finally got my vegetarian card after three and a half years. I also finished a book I’d been working on, In the Wake by Christina Sharpe. I highly recommend it, and the philosophy nerd in me wants to reread it already. I hope everyone had a safe and introspective 4^th of July; I finally watched the Becoming documentary and got all hopeful about what this country could become. I’ve been thinking a lot about what we, individually and collectively, are becoming and what we would like to become.

Keeping my mask on,

Week 6: 3D

[All views are my own.]

This week, I made some fun coding progress. I refined my maps of the storms and started exploring some new variables. Up till now, I’d been working with 2D averaged data fields; now, I’m working with 3D data cubes of weather data. Moving up a dimension means lots more information, which also means even bigger files and even slower code. Should I be proud or concerned that I’m making a supercomputer run slow?

At NASA (virtually), I got to hear from some scientists working on LISA. If you liked LIGO, you’re gonna love LISA; it’s a massive, space-based interferometer that’ll detect gravitational waves in the millihertz band! They’re hoping to launch it in the 2030’s, which seems far away but on NASA timescales that’s basically tomorrow. They already have a ton of cool science plans and I’m pretty excited about them. I also got to hear from some graduate schools in a panel for us interns. I’m considering a lot of factors, but schools removing their GRE requirements are definitely moving up on my list.

Us SPS interns helped plan and host a virtual picnic on Thursday, which was less strange than you might imagine. We chatted with each other’s project mentors and various AIP friends, and I woefully lost at Physics Jeopardy. We also have our demo competition deadline tonight. I finished my fire tornado video just in time, and I am pretty proud of it considering I’d never edited a video together before. I’m excited to watch everyone else’s!

Outside of this internship, I’ve been dealing with TN’s voting laws and calling my representatives. Because I moved counties, I had to go show my ID to the voting office in order to vote absentee in the upcoming elections. I really feel like all in-person requirements should be waived due to, y’know, the pandemic, but TN does love its restrictive voting laws. I called my senators about the student ban that ICE is trying to impose on international students. I’m not sure if it helped, but I figured I might as well. There are so many things to be concerned about right now and I am trying to do whatever small things I can to help.

From 6ft away,

Week 7: Focus

[All views are my own.]

Hope everyone is doing well!

This week, I kept working on my data analysis coding. We realized that this whole project of correlating weather variables will take a lot more work than 10 weeks of interning can handle, so now I am working on some more specific results. By focusing in more, I can run codes much faster on longer chunks of data. I made some plots of average wind speed trends over the past 40 years! I’m excited to keep learning as we finish up this internship.

I attended some fun NASA talks this week, starting with one about the National Center for Environmental Predictions (NCEP). I learned about how weather stations across the country (and across the world!) work together to predict weather from hourly to yearly scales. I also went to a talk about giving technical presentations, which was both useful and stressful because our presentations are coming up so fast.

On the SPS side of things, we had a resume workshop with Dr. Crystal Bailey, the head of Career Programs at APS. She gave us some useful resume-building tips and statistics about physics careers. Then, we had a fun chat with Dr. John Mather! Dr. Mather is the coolest and kindest Nobel Prize winner I know, and I’m not just saying that because he’s the only Nobel Prize winner I know. I’ve seen him speak a couple times, and his passion for science and science policy is always inspiring.

On the social side of things, us interns had an impromptu happy hour just because. I found out this week that Rhodes will be all virtual this fall, which is unfortunately the best move. It was nice to just chat about our crazy school/life situations, while also having an intense debate over astrology (astronomy’s more my jam, but you do you). I also had my first Zoom yoga session yesterday, which was surprisingly great. I’m hoping to catch the comet NEOWISE in a bit, so until next week,

Week 8: Growing

[All views are my own.]

We are eight weeks into this internship and it is almost August!

This week, I ran a bunch more code and might have found something interesting! We’re still looking at seasonal trends in wind speeds, and there seems to be a decreasing trend in horizontal wind speeds over the summer. This decrease could be related to how shorter EPEs have decreasing propagations in the summer. Weather science is cool! I also went back and edited some codes, and I’m hoping to find some more trends next week. Oh, and I wrote up an abstract because we only have two weeks left and I need to get started on a presentation.

This week’s webinars included some cool talks about space telescopes, namely the HST and its new friend the JWST. Jim Jeletic gave a great talk about Hubble’s history and successes. If you didn’t know, Hubble’s been up there getting data for over 30 years! That’s longer than I’ve been alive. I’d never really thought about how surreal and impressive it is that we have a literal telescope in space. And next year (hopefully) we’ll have another, even more surreal telescope in space! Our friend John Mather gave us NASA interns a talk about the JWST, for which he is the Senior Project Scientist. It’s a really exciting and impressive project, and I look forward to the data!

Outside of this internship and inside my apartment, I got to vote this week! Although the process is still pretty complicated, I’m glad that Tennessee is allowing absentee voting for everyone this election season. Caveat to that statement: not everyone can vote! I recently learned that most prisoners can’t vote, which is absurd. To learn about that and more, I highly recommend Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis. In happier news, I’m very excited about my oxalis plant growing! I bought this little oxalis triangularis from a friend earlier this summer, and it’s finally sprouting these adorable shoots. The leaves close up at night, which is incredibly endearing. Maybe I’ll post a photo next week!

Till then,

Week 9: Abstracting

[All views are my own.]

Happy August! Or as it sometimes feels, happy March part 6!

This week, I started wrapping up my research project. I wrote up a longer abstract for NASA and seeing my work all formalized was pretty affirming. I started putting together my presentation, which meant going through a bunch of figures and finalizing the best ones. I also spent some time cleaning up and explaining my codes; your codes are only as good as their comments! I hope my code children will go on to make cool results in the future.

In NASA news, I listened to a cool talk about how they select astronauts nowadays. Did you know up to a third of their applicants apply as a joke, just to get a rejection letter from NASA? Pretty funny. I think I’m alright studying space from down here, but it’s interesting to think about. NASA also hosted a panel for National Intern Day, full of impressive former interns-turned-NASA administrators. It was cool to hear about their paths after interning!

In SPS news, we had a great talk from Dr. Michael Fuhrer about topological insulators. I know next to nothing about condensed matter physics, but it seems really rad! If you like quantum physics, electronics, and math, his lab is for you. Us interns also had a quick little hangout, just to chat and see each other’s pets. Being remote has a lot of downsides, but I am glad I get to meet everybody’s pets.

In personal news, my oxalis is growing happily! Scrapbook photos attached. My mornings these days consist of making coffee/tea, reading some, and seeing how much my plant has grown.