Modeling Ice Cover on Trails at Grand Canyon National Park

This project used data from the National Park Service, the SRTM data set, and recorded weather conditions to predict snow deposition and snow and ice melt in the Grand Canyon National Park. This model, a simplified version of previous research, shows the location of persistent ice and snow on the Canyon slopes in March.

Gulf of Mexico's Offshore Oil Platform Wind Potential

There are over 6000 natural resource drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, all of which will become obsolete once their deposits are extracted. This study examined one of the possible alternate uses for these platforms, wind power potential. Using ArcGIS the number of platforms was reduced by weighting their distance from National Data Buoy Center wind speed collection points and water depth. Calculations were done to assess the optimal sites remaining, as well as provide an estimate of the energy potential for each site. Data for this project was obtained from the Minerals Management Service (MMS), United States Geological Service (USGS), and National Data Buoy Center (NDBC). A major limitation of this project was a lack of NDBC wind speed buoys, creating large data gaps and excluding many oil rigs that have otherwise high energy potential.