NASA Internship at Goddard Space Flight Center

Tyler Summers – University of Alaska Fairbanks
Writer Kim Morris     

From early June to the end of September, Tyler Summers was a virtual intern at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The University of Alaska Fairbanks Master’s student examined the air quality resulting from Alaska wildfires (aerosol particle size, fine-mode-fraction, and aerosol optical depth). He used the new high-resolution Multi-Angle Geostationary Aerosol Retrieval Algorithm (MAGARA) to extract and analyze the relevant Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) data.

Before using the MAGARA, Tyler completed a line-by-line documentation of the algorithm. He explains that “this ‘deep dive’ into the code helped me understand how the MAGARA works and benefits future users by describing the algorithm’s essential elements.”

Next, he began the process of moving, or porting, MAGARA from a desktop computer to a supercomputer. Tyler’s research uses large GOES datasets. A supercomputer was required to run the MAGARA efficiently with these large input files.

Then, Tyler modified the MAGARA to retrieve data from high latitudes (> 56 degrees). The MAGARA was designed to retrieve data over the contiguous United States using either GOES-16 or both GOES-16 and -17. Alaska sits on the outer edge of GOES-17’s field-of-view and is not imaged by GOES-16 at all. The pixel sizes and shapes of GOES-17 data acquired at high latitudes are distorted by more extreme view angles and the curvature of the Earth making these data more difficult to work with.

Finally, he used NASA’s Worldview tool to identify three Alaska wildfire events in the 2019 MODIS (Terra) true color reflectance dataset. Unfortunately, the Alaskan wildfire MAGARA run remains a work-in-progress because the “initial results demonstrated a temporal interpolation issue between the algorithm’s time intervals and the GOES-17 data that needs to be resolved.”

Tyler gave two presentations about his research to the NASA Goddard community and participated in weekly NASA staff meetings. His NASA mentor, Dr. Mariel Friberg, is now a member of his graduate degree committee. He says that his internship “has given me invaluable research experience and networking opportunities that will undoubtedly further my future academic and professional development.”