Hard to believe that two months have passed since arriving in Chile. Like the last month, I have had many opportunities to interact with faculty, students, and others around Chillán. I have a core group of students that I work with on a weekly basis and provide guidance on their theses and research directions… I have started to explore the GRACE satellite data across central Chile, represented as terrestrial water storage. The eventual challenge is to correctly use auxiliary datasets to derive a groundwater signal by removing water balance components from the terrestrial water storage signal of the GRACE satellites. …The groundwater well information will be needed to compare to the accuracy of the derived signal from GRACE. I am continuing to write computer codes to process the data and perform exploratory analysis on the results. This is an iterative process and constantly evolving. .. As previously mentioned, I am also helping mentor several doctoral and master students on their thesis projects and a professor on another project.

José Luis: José Luis is my mentor professor at the university… he has additional interest in investigating soil moisture and water changes in the Rio Lonquen near Ninhue using remote sensing. Because of my experience in satellite remote sensing, he wants to learn how to apply remote sensing to investigate the changes he’s personally observed over the past 20 years.

Daniela: I have continued to meet with Daniela to discuss journal papers and techniques that could be utilized to help understand her field site at the Santa Elena lagoon…we are utilizing satellite remote sensing… and utilize Google Earth Engine to perform her analysis and research.

(left to right) Christopher, Bárbara (doctoral student), Daniela (master’s student), and José Luis (professor) crossing the river to access several springs while conducting field work near the Chillán Volcano.

With Iongel: I have continued to meet with Iongel on a weekly basis. Our time is split between discussion of his research, analyzing data, to spending several hours on instruction to Google Earth Engine and computer coding… Iongel created a poster presentation of some of the preliminary results and presented it at the “Primer encuentro de estudiantes e investigadores postdoctorales CRHIAM” in Concepción at the main university campus. He won first place for best poster presentation.

Barbara: This month I helped with a day of field work at her study site near the Chillán Volcano. ..

My goal for May is to continue to investigate the terrestrial water storage changes across central and southern Chile and start to narrow in on the groundwater signal. Using a combination of data sources, I hope to independently derive the water balance components and compare to GRACE. To get to this point, I will need to identify land surface model estimates or other data products that are representative of the regions. This is an important component in isolating the groundwater signal. ..Coming up, I will give a charla to doctoral students at the university about remote sensing and water resources. ..I am also scheduled to go to Petorca and Viña del Mar with two students and Professor José Luis for field work.