USTC 2023 Undergraduate Research Plan Outstanding Award
Published:
USTC recognized my project with the 2023 Undergraduate Research Plan Outstanding Award. The project used WACCM-X and observations to study how the 2022 Tonga eruption disturbed the mesosphere and lower thermosphere.
Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01
The notice, issued by the USTC Office of Teaching Affairs in December 2023, gave the university-level Outstanding Award of the Undergraduate Research Plan to 19 students. My project was one of them.
What the plan is
USTC’s Undergraduate Research Plan lets students take on a real research project under a faculty advisor before graduation. The student works on one question over months and is assessed on what came out of it. The university-level Outstanding Award recognizes the strongest projects of the year.
The project
My project asked how the January 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption disturbed the mesosphere and lower thermosphere, the layer of the atmosphere between roughly 70 and 110 kilometers. I compared the WACCM-X whole-atmosphere model with winds measured by four meteor radar stations, after projecting each station’s winds onto the great-circle direction from the volcano so they could be compared on the same footing.
Where it went next
December 2023 turned out to be a busy month for this one question. The same month the award was announced, I presented the work as a poster at the AGU Fall Meeting 2023 in San Francisco. Half a year later it became my undergraduate thesis, which received USTC’s 2024 Outstanding Graduation Thesis Award. That post explains the science in more detail.
What the path taught me
The useful part of a formal research plan is that it has checkpoints. Having to report progress forces a vague interest (“what did the volcano do to the upper atmosphere?”) into a method that can fail in a specific way. Once the method existed, the same work could be reused three times: as a project report, a conference poster, and a thesis. Each audience asked different questions, and each round of questions made the analysis tighter.
A small, well-defined research question can carry an undergraduate a long way if it is pushed through more than one round of review.
See the official award notice.
