Undergraduate Project Among the Top Four Winning Projects for the USPROC 2009

We are pleased to announce that two of our Statistics undergraduate majors, Victor Louie and Maykel Vosoughiazad, have received one of the top four awards for their paper "Recent Trends in Methane:  A Spacio-Temporal Analysis" in the 2009  Second Biennial International Undergraduate Student Project Competition (USPROC).

The final rankings will be announced at the United States Conference on Teaching Statistics (USCOTS) at Ohio State University, June 25-27. Victor and Maykel have been invited to the conference to present their work.

In their paper, Victor and Maykel perform spatio-temporal analysis of methane gas in the atmosphere of recent years. A newly discovered concern is that a large amount of methane is being released into the atmosphere through what are termed methane "chimneys" in the Arctic permafrost[1]. Victor and Maykel’s analysis includes variogram fitting, kriging predictions, hypothesis testing, and trend analysis to test this hypothesis.

We would like to congratulate Victor and Maykel for their achievement and acknowledge their supervisors Nicolas Christou and Dave Zes. Particular acknowledgement goes to Dave Zes for his hard work and dedication to the completion of this project, and to the Center of Environmental Statistics (CES) for providing the topics and ideas.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-na-global-warming22-2009feb22,0,646220.story