Joanna Sobolewska, 2016, Woodrow Wilson School

Joanna Sobolewska ’16

The goal of my summer project was to determine whether relationships between fish and their environment break down due to climate change. I worked with Rebecca Asch, a postdoctoral fellow in the atmospheric and oceanic sciences department under Jorge Sarmiento. The way we worked to answer this question was through data analysis of CalCOFI data which was sourced off the coast of Southern California. We cleaned the data up in MATLAB and did some preliminary statistics and then used Generalized Additive Models in R to answer the question. I did this analysis for sardinops sagax, commonly known as sardines. We found that the relationship between temperature and fish breaks down with global warming. This implies that the models we are using now that predict the relationship between fish and temperature are wrong because they assume the relationship will hold even with climate change. Through the internship, I learned how to think critically and analytically, how to code using MATLAB and GAM on R, and about other topics relating to atmospheric and oceanic sciences. I will now be working on a senior thesis project that is tangentially related to my project this summer.