CU Internship for Credit

In 2019, ACOM in collaboration with Dr. Katja Friedrich at the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (ATOC) at CU Boulder initiated the CU Internship for Credit program as a pilot program to strengthen interactions with students. The program is targeted at undergraduate students, who typically conduct a six-week internship at ACOM under the guidance of ACOM scientists in exchange for course credit hours. This year the program has been refined to include a questionnaire for prospective students to optimize the experience for both students and ACOM scientists. The questionnaire forms the basis for developing a project plan, which the student works on during the internship. At the end of the internship, students give a presentation in ACOM and are evaluated against milestones designed specifically for this program.

Peizhi Hao, a fourth-year undergraduate student, was selected as an intern in 2021. In collaboration with Drs Wenfu Tang, Rebecca Buchholz and Gabriele Pfister, he developed a project to study the impact of wildfire emissions on simulated weather conditions over the Continental U.S. during the NSF WE-CAN field campaign period in 2018. Peizhi took ownership of the research direction and project progress to learn to use the global model (CESM/CAM-chem) and perform simulations with and without fire emissions, for a spatiotemporal region defined by his analysis of the 2018 fire season. He subsequently analyzed the model output, using prior knowledge of meteorology to select and investigate weather diagnostics, and applied correlation analysis to investigate the connections between fire emissions and weather. He also compared the results with observations to understand the model limitations. Peizhi continues to collaborate with ACOM as he writes up the results for publication.