The Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) is excited to offer a paid 10-week summer programming internship where you can gain experience coding in an academic research environment.

Our internship provides seven highly motivated undergraduate students an opportunity to apply their coding abilities in support of cutting-edge atmospheric research. From year to year projects may include a combination of designing, monitoring, and debugging data ingest archival systems; creating and maintaining data analysis tools; and calibration, processing and visualization of atmospheric data collected from ground, aircraft or satellite based instrumentation in collaboration with partners and funders that include NOAA, NASA, NSF and DOE.

Interns will work individually with SSEC researchers to define the work to be completed. The intern will be provided with self guided tutorials on the programming languages and tools that will be used for the summer projects. Access to programming experts within our scientific instrumentation software team will be available as a resource throughout the summer for questions on the tutorials and summer projects.

A member of the scientific instrumentation software team will lead weekly meetings with the interns to discuss the challenges and successes of everyone’s projects. Minimum pay will be $16.25 an hour and based on experience. Preferably 40 hours a week but accommodations can be made due to restrictions to those already employed by the University of Wisconsin – System.

Dates:

  • 12 January 2022: Listing of projects finalized
  • 24 January 2022: Job Posting Active Click here to apply
  • 25 February 2022: Application deadline
  • 7 March 2022 – 18 March 2022: Interviews and offers
  • 31 May 2022 – 5 August 2022: SSEC Summer Programming Internship

Location: Madison, WI

Applicant Requirements:

  • Must be currently enrolled at an accredited U.S. institution, completed at least one year as an undergraduate student and be enrolled in the fall

Application components:

  • Cover letter which must include: 
    • Statement of interest to work at the SSEC
    • Example of a programming project that exemplifies your passion and drive for programming
    • Up to 3 research projects from the list below you want to work on and why you would be a good fit
  • Resume
  • Accepting applications until 25 February 2022

Research projects (new for 2022):

  • Implement and apply convolutional neural network (CNN) clustering methods, using either Tensorflow or PyTorch, on NASA atmospheric remote sensing satellite imagery such as MODIS and VIIRS.

  • Design and implement software in Python to populate and interface to a SQL database for Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) weather satellites and other meteorological datasets.

  • Learning and applying DevOps practices to produce cutting-edge volcanic eruption event detection and tracking suite, including Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment using gitlab, podman/docker, and Kubernetes systems.

  • Investigate the feasibility of using AI/ML techniques to generating the expected observed values of ABI’s 3.9 micron band based on the concurrent observations from other ABI bands and the past observations with all bands, for use with the Wildfire Automated Biomass Burning Algorithm.

  • Create a high speed imagery generation pipeline and develop a website for display and query of the data from the Wildfire Automated Biomass Burning Algorithm, programming tools and language(s) to be used is flexible.

  • Design and implement a webpage to create interactive plots of meteorological data from JSON files using Python and Javascript tools such as Plotly, Bokeh, Holoviz, and/or Flask.

  • Working on a suite of data delivery, visualization and analysis software packages called McIDAS, programming in either Java or Python.

Questions?

Email Denny Hackel with questions at djhackel@wisc.edu