Pictured is the confluence of the Iguazu and Parana rivers. On the left is Paraguay, on the right Brazil, taken from Argentina. (Photo by Phillip Capper, Creative Commons License 2.0.)
Finding Her Focus
Before she officially started her course work, though, Besnier wasn’t sure exactly where her research focus would lie.
“I had no idea about remote sensing hydrology or any idea of what regions or topics I wanted to work on,” she said.
But her adviser, professor Venkataraman Lakshmi, gave her a preliminary assignment that summer: Submit an abstract for the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting on something you may wish to research further.
“So, after some conversations and some googling and reading of articles, I decided to find a natural disaster that happened somewhere Spanish-speaking, as I minored in Spanish as an undergrad,” she said.
“That narrowed it down to natural disasters in Central and South America. From there, I found articles and decided to study the drought event in La Plata River Basin.”
This NASA graphic shows before and after drought conditions.
From Access to Success
UVA connected Besnier with two NASA hydrologists, Augusto Getirana and Hiroko Beaudoing, who have at their fingertips some of the best satellite-based resources in the world at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
Now, she’s author with those two experts and Lakshmi on her first published paper as first author. The Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies featured the article in its April edition.
The research is first to use high-resolution moisture data to understand the drought’s footprint over space and time.
The team’s findings confirmed previous assertions about the drought’s progression and discovered that the Upper Parana subbasin lost the most water throughout the period.
Besnier is a Richmond native who earned her undergraduate degree from James Madison University.
“This was my first project I worked on in my Ph.D. journey, and I was so surprised by the number of datasets, resources and training available to the public and to me in grad school,” Besnier said.
Source link : https://engineering.virginia.edu/news-events/news/her-path-nasa-research-and-helping-south-america-manage-future-droughts
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Publish date : 2024-04-11 03:00:00
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