Day 18: Turn that frown upside down!

This morning was spent at Dr. Becker’s house where we continued to try to change the unit of measure for our Z values but where unsuccessful. We walked up to the staging area in the field and were able to catch Dr. Weschler before she began her own project. After explaining to her our problems she quickly knew what to do. The answer to our conversion dilemma was so easy! All we had to do was choose a different dropdown option in the pathfinder software we download our trimble points to! The joys of this success were quickly canceled out because many of the points were still wrong. We hiked back down to Dr. Becker’s house with Paul and after looking at our data he suggested going back out into the field to recollect the worst points. After arriving to our first ‘recollection point location’ it was decided that the trimble may be faulty and we should try to collect points using a different unit. We hiked back to the staging area, grabbed a different trimble and collected our points.

Before dinner I was able to download many useful shapefiles from the state of Hawaii site. I have to say I was a little discouraged with how the day turned out, many of our data points were deemed unusable, and I still couldn’t figure out a correlation between any of the data we’d collected and what I was seeing. After a great spaghetti dinner I was able to pull Dr. Weschler and Emily aside and start downloading our new data points and the shapefiles I had found. To a joyful surprise I started to see the correlations between the data! There are three aquifers within the Ka’a’awa valley, and three dikes. We’ve been able to confirm two and will look for the third tomorrow. The stream disappears very close to the point were two of the aquifers divide, and if we can prove this with GPR my research project will have become amazing! The point where the stream disappears seems a little far off from the aquifer split but Emily and I are assuming the water isn’t going as far because there simply isn’t enough. That is it hasn’t rained enough. All in all, it is very exciting to see these trends in the data and really feel like I’m doing something. It is also super cool that James, Courtney, and my own research projects seem to overlap so in the end we will answer many of each other’s questions!