CEE graduate student Brittany Bruder returns to Georgia Tech Savannah (GTS) Fall semester after conducting research at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. She was admitted to the Summer Program in Earth System Science offered by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's (GSFC) Earth Sciences Division, in collaboration with the Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology (GEST) Center of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. The program is designed to enable selected students to carry out an intensive research project which can be applied to the student's graduate thesis. Brittany is advised by Dr. Francesco Fedele at GTS and she is involved in research to assess tidal energy potential in coastal Georgia and novel sustainable devices to harness energy from tidal streams.
Under the guidance of Dr. John Moisan at NASA, Brittany analyzed ocean surface heights in response to tidal and meteorological forcings in the Chesapeake Bay. Using a ROMs computer model of the Chesapeake created by Dr. Jiangtao Xu at the University of Maryland, Brittany was able to create a tidal prediction model of the bay utilizing solely surface height and wind output, data frequently collected by remote sensors. Her research supports the use of remote satellite sensors for tidal prediction models as well as an improved prediction in tidal response to meteorological events for the Chesapeake Bay. Her work with Xu and Moisan will be submitted for publication later this year.
Successfully completing this program at NASA is an important step for Brittany’s research. She will exploit the knowledge and analytical techniques she learned to develop a new stochastic tidal prediction model for coastal Georgia to assess tidal energy potentials. Brittany just started her second semester at Georgia Tech.
