Nicole Casamassina is an Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences student minoring in Coastal Environmental Studies and Geospatial Science. As a result of her work in GSS 313/314 with Maria Brown, she presented a conference poster at the Northeastern Storms conference on March 4-6 in Saratoga Springs, NY. Nicole is Vice President of the Stony Brook University Meteorology Club.
From Nicole:
This project is an “Evaluation of Hurricane Preparedness in New Jersey” and was done in Maria Brown’s GSS 313/314 class in Fall 2015. I created four maps which outline different aspects of hurricane preparedness that should be considered when making important decisions on whether or not disaster plan should be changed. For my first map, I received minimum barometric pressure, peak wind gust, and total rainfall measurements from the Office of the State Climatologist of New Jersey at Rutgers University and mapped these data in major cities in the state. The second map was a comparison of locations of hospitals to FEMA designated hurricane evacuation routes and population density. My third map showed vulnerability to coastal flooding, and the fourth map compared elevation to major roads, hurricane evacuation routes, and population density. I presented this project as a poster presentation at the Northeastern Storms Conference in Saratoga Springs, NY on March 5, 2016. It was such a great experience and I hope to do an oral presentation at next year’s conference. In the future, I hope to combine my two interests, atmospheric science and geographic information systems, to conduct more research projects in meteorology and climatology using GIS. This is an up and coming trend in the world of meteorology, which I found out at this conference.
