Meetings/Conferences Visitors
DeMaria, Motta, Molenar, Watson, Dostalek, Weaver, Zehr, Hillger, Hilgendorf, Gosden
The week of September 17, M. DeMaria provided a telephone interview on the possible inland effects of tropical cyclones for a newspaper story on Hurricane Floyd. Output from a surface wind prediction model for a hypothetical storm similar to Floyd, but with a more westerly track was provided for the report.
Loops of Rapid Scan and Super Rapid Scan GOES visible imagery were provided to The Weather Channel for use in training and on-air promotions. Five tropical cyclone loops, a severe weather case, and a lake effect snow case were included in the examples. A brief description was also provided for each case.
The week of July 9, M. DeMaria meet with Dr. Tom Vonder Haar, CIRA and Dr. Steve Rutledge from the Colorado State University Department of Atmospheric Science to discuss possible research collaboration. Dr. Rutledge is interested in adapting the Virtual Laboratory concept used by CIRA to disseminate satellite data to distribute radar observations. He is also interested in joint research to combine radar and satellite observations to diagnose and forecast precipitation. A joint CIRA/CSU proposal may be submitted to the U.S. Weather Research Program early next year.
D. Hillger participated in the Suomi AMS Tenth Radiation Conference in Madison WI, June 28 - July 1. A poster was presented at the conference on "Using the New 1.6 um Channel on NOAA-15 in Satellite Product Development." On the same trip, a visit was made to CIMSS to discuss work on two on-going projects.
Several RAMM team members made presentations at annual Pingree Park Retreat , July 27-29. Presenters included B. Connell, M. DeMaria, E. Hilgendorf, J. Dostalek, D. Hillger, and R. Zehr. The retreat also had representatives from non-RAMM team CIRA staff , CIMSS, and ORA.
J. Dostalek attended the PACJET (Pacific Landfalling Jets Experiment) Planning Workshop held on August 31 and September 1 in Monterey, CA. PACJET is a follow-on experiment to CALJET (California Landfalling Jets Experiment ) in which mid-latitude Pacific Cyclones affecting the U.S. west coast will be studied during the 2000/2001 winter season. He gave a talk concerning the use of AMSU (Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit) data during the PACJET experiment. CIRA will play a primary role in the satellite support of PACJET.
The week of August 13, a planning meeting was held for the SAB RAMSDIS development. A preliminary version will have the following image products - Tropical: 24-hr GOES-East 14 km water vapor (WV) loop; 24-hr AVG IMG loop of the 14 km WV; movable matching 4-km Mercator loops of IR, VIS (Ch2 at night) and most recent SSMI 85Ghz and AMSU Channel 7 images; 6-hr motion-relative AVG IMG IR loop; motion-relative, full-resolution visible loop; and a sea surface temperature product. Volcanic ash and snow/ice applications: movable GOES principal component and multispectral images for two locations.
Kevin Maschoff of Lockheed Martin Space Instruments visited CIRA on September 14 to discuss Advanced Baseline Imager concepts with several CIRA personnel. Dr. Maschoff was given a tour of CIRA's RAMSDIS Central showing prototypes of several of the different types of RAMSDIS units that utilize satellite data for research purposes.
Gary Ellrod of ARAD visited CIRA on September 21 to discuss joint work on an extended abstract for the upcoming Satellite Conference.
Mr. Selvin Burton from the Regional Meteorological Training Center (RMTC) in Barbados visited CIRA, July 12-23. He spent a busy two weeks reviewing archived climatology imagery, and focused on temperature threshold techniques for the 10.7 m imagery to derive cloud frequency composites for the various rainy months. Since rainfall data is sparse in the region, these composites, along with other information will help in rainfall estimates. An example of 10.7 m cloud frequency composites for a threshold temperature of 280 K for October, November and December, 1998 is shown. October is one of the rainy months and December a drier month. November 1998 was drier than normal.
J. Dostalek and J. Weaver hosted Loren Phillips, (SOO at the Lubbock, TX NWSFO) from September 13 to 15 to begin collaboration on a study of the severe weather outbreak which took place in the Texas panhandle on 25 May 1999.
