Today, with the sun shining here in Washington state, it seems to be a good day to discuss my progress at University of Nebraska Lincoln on my retirement* PhD program in the School of Natural Resources. The short version of the story is that everything is going well. I work closely with my adviser, Dr. Troy Gilmore, on research for my dissertation–we talk almost every day. We have an academic poster in progress and have enough research results for at least one scholarly article. The more we talk about what we are doing, the more we believe we are onto something that will be of interest to a lot of people in the world of hydrology.
What we are doing is figuring out a way to measure the water level in images of streams and rivers when normally available data from the United States Geological Survey is available at the site where the images were captured. We have done a literature review and it appears no one has attempted what have already accomplished. That is a good thing. So, my non-retirement, retirement PhD proceeds ahead full bore. The plan is to finish our first pass at the research, publish a poster and a paper or two, then when I retire, take classes to catch me up on the highly technical aspects of Natural Resources Science and Hydrology about which I know absolutely nothing before finishing the writing of a thesis based on research we have pretty much completed (with a few small nooks and crannies we need to fill in).
*Scheduled to retire and go full time on the PhD within about two years if COVID-19 does not foul up our plans.