NC State Univeristy's Masters of Geospatial Science and Technology – Professional Portfolio
I am a graduating Masters student from NCSU’s MGIST program, a program that I began in the fall of 2016. As a previous meteorologist with the National Weather Service, I came into the program with a background in analyzing large quantites of data with the end goal of producing a forecast. I worked in both the Juneau, AK and Washington D.C. forecast offices where I combined observed weather data, forecast model output and climate indices to produce a forecast. Some of the major weather events I worked were Hurricane Irene (during which I wrote the aviation forecasts for Dulles International, Baltimore-Washington International and Reagan National airports), many major Gulf of Alaska storms and the 2012 derecho that swept across the mid-Atlantic states. The picture included on this page is of me hiking on the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, AK. During my time at NCSU, I had the opportunity to work as a TA for 4 of the courses in the MGIST program. They are GIS510 – Fundamentals of Geographic Information Science and Technology, GIS515 – Cartographic Design, GIS530 – Spatial Data Foundations and GIS660 – MGIST Professional Portfolio. Being able to TA these courses was incredibly rewarding and increased my knowledge of GIS principles and applications. The last 2 years in NCSU’s MGIST program have been packed full of information learning geospatial analysis techniques, creating tools to visualize geospatial data and creating/managing databases. For my captsone project, I was able to combine my weather expertise with GIS to produce a landslide forecasting tool for use by the Juneau NWS office.
Carrie L. Suffern 