Internships

Kate Begland ’17

This summer I worked with Professor Jorge Sarmiento, Dr. Carolina Dufour, and Dr. Alison Gray to assess how the Southern Ocean – the ocean south of 30°S – will respond to climate change. Specifically, we looked at the output of two climate models of varying resolutions that simulated the effect of an increase in atmospheric carbon on the dissolved inorganic carbon content of the Southern Ocean. There are still many potential effects of climate change that we do not fully understand, which limits our ability to cope. I used the programming language MATLAB to examine how the Southern Ocean’s ability to take up carbon and transport it to the depths of the ocean changed when more carbon dioxide was added to the atmosphere in the climate models. I gained programming experience using MATLAB and also learned how to work with large matrices of model data. This research experience helped me to make the decision to apply to graduate school for geosciences.