Space Science and Engineering Center University of Wisconsin-Madison

Fifty years ago, the Kennedy administration promoted national investment in basic scientific research as a way to spur meaningful technological growth. Continued investment is critical to scientific and technological progress.

Having designed and built what will be the nation’s next generation of ice coring drills, the Ice Drilling Design and Operations group (IDDO) at SSEC sent its instrument packing for Greenland on March 26. The Intermediate Depth Drill, IDD, is designed to recover ice cores from depths of 1,500 meters—nearly 5,000 feet. Ice coring drills provide scientists with ice samples thousands of years old, from which they can learn about changes in climate and air quality over time.

Until recently, researchers grappled with incomplete and inconsistent imagery of winds near the poles. A team led by Matthew Lazzara at SSEC has turned a new page on generating high-quality wind imagery, with a technique that promises improvements for forecasting and numerical weather prediction.

The latitude at which tropical cyclones reach their maximum intensity is migrating away from the tropics, shifting in the direction of the poles at a rate of about one-half degree of latitude per decade in both hemispheres. A study published last spring in the journal Nature documents this poleward migration by analyzing global historical tropical cyclone data for the past 30 years.

Researcher Michelle Feltz, as an undergraduate at UW-Madison, undertook the challenge to develop a new temperature validation method using GPS radio occultation data. The results of her research were recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, in a paper on which she was lead author.

With support from the NOAA/NASA GOES-R Program Office last year, scientists from SSEC and CIMSS developed an intensive bootcamp in the fundamentals of satellite remote sensing and radiative transfer.

While in Madison to deliver a keynote address for the Satellites and Education Conference, Louis Uccellini, NWS Director and UW-Madison alumnus, answered some questions on some of the most important developments in the Weather Ready Nation initiative in the last year.

By nearly any measure, it was the largest and most complex international field experiment ever conducted in meteorology up to the mid-1970s. Known as the GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE) it was the first observing phase of the Global Atmospheric Research Programme (GARP) lasting 100 days during the summer of 1974.

In September 2013, SSEC researchers reached an important milestone, bringing them one step (or, in this case, a giant leap) closer to seeing their newly developed satellite instrument technology in orbit: the Absolute Radiance Interferometer (ARI) instrument was declared ready for a spaceflight opportunity by NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office.

Not long ago, come rain or storm, outdoor athletic events went on — regardless of the weather and its potential hazards. But today, improvements in weather forecasting are making it possible to ensure public safety during large outdoor college sporting events.

For the third year in a row, SSEC was involved in a NASA-led field campaign designed to study hurricane formation and intensity in the Atlantic Ocean Basin. The Hurricane and Severe Storms Sentinel (HS3) campaign uses two Global Hawk unmanned aircraft equipped with scientific instruments, including SSEC’s Scanning HIS, to collect important data about the life cycles of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.

Earlier this year, a team of NOAA and CIMSS scientists reached a major milestone by delivering an operational PATMOS-x (Pathfinder Atmospheres Extended) cloud properties Climate Data Record (CDR) to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).