A summer exploring Long Island Sound from boats and satellites

By Dean Wilson Gelling 

Dean at the Great South Bay, Photo by Minsun Lee

When I set foot on the campus of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) for the first time in May, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was selected alongside 30 students as a participant in Lamont's Summer Intern program to conduct research under some of the most talented minds in geosciences. The internship took place during a time of tremendous change in my life, as I was in the process of transferring to Columbia University.

​I had experience in environmental education and conservation but never worked in a research setting. Yet, when offered the mentorship of Dr. Joaquim Goes and Dr. Maria Tzortziou, I dove right in

The topic of my research was to identify the drivers of biogeochemical processes in the coastal waterways of Long Island. The Long Island Sound is one of the world's most densely populated tidal estuaries, with many industries, people, and wildlife who rely on it. As a result, it has been the subject of detailed, periodic research by universities and government agencies. However, less is known about the dynamics of the shallower waterways that line the coast of Long Island, especially as they relate to the more extensive marine system of which they are a part. These bays and inlets form the primary interface between the open water and the heavily developed land surrounding it. Still, it can be difficult to use satellite imagery to monitor these shallow coastal waters due to obstacles like bottom reflectance and low spatial resolution sensors.

Many early mornings were spent in the Tzortziou Bio-Optics Lab at the Center of Discovery and Innovation on the CCNY campus. The lab members and I prepare equipment and set out for our two principal research areas, the Great South Bay and the Peconic Bay. We met up with one of the local fishing captains, Greg or Brad, and sailed to stations that we wanted to analyze. Using an EXO2 water quality sonde and sampling the water directly at the surface, we could understand the water's characteristics at various depths. By combining these measurements with hyperspectral reflectance spectra taken from an SVC spectroradiometer, we were able to understand how the water absorbs and reflects light based on its underlying biogeochemical properties. The ultimate hope is that models based on satellite imagery from these days would agree with our in-water observations. Ultimately, their correlations were quite strong, and I presented my findings in a symposium at the LDEO campus when summer ended.
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Working in a lab is like no job I've ever had, and I couldn't have anticipated how challenging yet extremely rewarding it would be. So rewarding, in fact, that I've decided to come on for the rest of the academic year as a part-time research assistant in the lab, performing similar biogeochemical analysis on the data our team brought back from their field excursions in Alaska this summer. I am so excited to see where the future takes me, but for now, I am simply seizing the exciting opportunities that I am so lucky to have before me.

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