Zehr, Grasso, Weaver, Motta

D. Hillger participated in several review meetings as an outside CSU faculty member for Tomoko Koyama, a Master's degree candidate of Dr. T.H. Vonder Haar.

Daily Hurricane Briefings: The daily hurricane briefings began with the active part of the Atlantic hurricane season.  The discussions are held at 3:00 pm in the CIRA Weather Lab, and are well attended by CIRA personnel, CSU students and faculty.  The goal is to present and discuss the current global tropical cyclone activity using Tropical RAMSDIS and forecasts readily available online.  Several CSU graduates have contributed this year as first-time discussion leaders.

J. Weaver, D. Bikos, J. Dostalek, D. Hillger, and B. Motta attended the annual CIRA Science Retreat at Colorado State University’s Pingree Park mountain campus.  Presentations focused on radiative transfer modeling and on severe thunderstorm efforts at CIRA.  RAMM Team members participated in breakout sessions on both topics.   There was also a 30-minute briefing by Erik Rasmussen (NSSL/Boulder office) on the upcoming International H2O Project, known by its acronym as IHOP.  J. Weaver was put in-charge of organizing the severe weather presentation.

J. Weaver is working with Nolan Doesken (Colorado Climate Center, CSU) to begin a short paper for the Journal of Climate utilizing mesoscale precipitation data collected by volunteers within the Climate Center’s CoCo RAHS (Community Collaborative Rain and Hail Study) study area.  There are more than 100 volunteers measuring daily precipitation in and around the Fort Collins area.  The observers receive training and a 4” NWS style rain gauge to make their measurements.  The study will include comparison with satellite cloud climatology results produced by C. Combs.  (see Cloud Climatologies)

B. Motta responded to an inquiry by Christian Page of the Universite du Quebec a Montreal regarding enhancement tables for GOES imagery.  An e-mail was sent to Christian and the larger Unidata community with pointers to NESDIS ORA, CIRA, and CIMSS sites with relevant tutorials and enhancement table files.