Gordon Keith
Programmer/Data Analyst
Gordon joined CSIRO in 2000. Life before CSIRO included five years
with the Australian Antarctic Division, five years with the Office
of the Supervising Scientist in Kakadu and five years at the Federal
Treasury in Canberra.
Gordon completed a bachelor of science with first class honours
in computer science and a bachelor of economics, both at the Australian
National University. Gordon moved to Kakadu with his wife, their
toddler and four month old baby.
It was originally a six month contract. "I liked the work
in Kakadu and they liked me. I had 13 extensions to my temporary
assignment, then we decided we wanted to see some weather, so
we moved to Tasmania. It was time for a change and Kakadu to Antarctica
looked
good."
Gordon's current role includes monitoring swath mapping aboard
the RV Southern Surveyor, processing swath data back in Hobart
to support habitat mapping, writing programs to visualise the
suite of data collected at sea and working with the Raw Data Logger.
This raw data has the potential to yield much more information
about the water and the bottom of our oceans.
A swath mapper, also known as a multibeam echo sounder, collects
information about the location of the sea bottom from the echo
of a number of beams of sound.
The EM300 model detects the bottom from the echoes of 135 beams.
"The beams fan out in a line across the ship and as the vessel
moves along we collect a swath of data. The raw data contains
a lot of information that's not needed to find the sea bottom,
so it's usually discarded. I plan to use this data to map the
water column in three dimensions, looking for fish schools and
so forth."
This voyage is a chance to collect a great deal of new data
from uncharted areas and test some of Gordon's programs.
"My wife and I have four children and I find it difficult
to be away. But some of the scripts I've written can best be tested
in the field. Another advantage of working at sea is that the
telephone doesn't ring and the email is fairly
thin on the ground."
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voyagers
Updated:
29/03/07
