In the News, Part II

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the News...

Broadcast

On the Net

In Print

Outreach

PEOPLE—SSEC’s Office of Space Science Education participated for the second year in the University of Wisconsin’s innovative summer program called PEOPLE. Standing for Pre-college Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence, PEOPLE is aimed at students from middle school through high school. Noted in On Wisconsin, Summer 2001, PEOPLE “is an integral part of the UW’s objective to increase the number of minority students, faculty, and staff by the year 2008.”

Bridgette Hood, a PEOPLE teacher from Milwaukee's Walker School, assembles rockets with students.

NASA SHARP-Plus—For the sixth year, SSEC is hosting student apprentices, brought to UW–Madison through the Summer High School Apprenticeship Research Program, or SHARP-Plus. This summer, three SHARP high school seniors-to-be are working at SSEC, out of the twenty students assigned to the UW–Madison. Lymaris Galarza and Karlo Dizon are working on Mars-related projects with Sanjay Limaye. Galarza attends Dr. Carlos Gonzalez High School in Aguada, Puerto Rico. Dizon attends Simon Sanchez High School in Dededo, Guam. Both students will also help develop applications for the GIFTS Sun Photometer. Christopher Nosal from Pensacola, Florida’s Pensacola High School is working with Gail Bayler and other CIMSS staff to collect and process satellite data. All three student apprentices will enter their senior year this fall. The SHARP-Plus program is an effort of NASA and the Quality Education for Minorities Network. SHARP allows student apprentices to apply their knowledge of mathematics and science in a true research environment.

SURE— Patrick Frascone was brought to SSEC through the SURE program, for Summer Undergraduate Research Experience. Pat is working with SSEC engineering staff to develop the GIFTS/GLOBE Sun Photometer for Water Vapor Special Measurements. Frascone is building, testing and calibrating the photometers which will be used in NASA-funded educational programs. He is a fifth-year senior in the space mathematics program at UW–Whitewater where he minors in physics and was All American in cross country running.

SURE provides students with opportunities that build on their interest in science and engineering careers. The ten-week program is coordinated by UW-Madison’s College of Engineering in cooperation with the Graduate School and NSF’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.

• OSSE Outreach

Weather Guys Steve Ackerman (SSEC’s CIMSS and AOS) and Jonathan Martin (AOS) appeared May 3 on Larry Meiller’s WHA Radio call-in show. Regulars on the show, Martin and Ackerman usually appear the last Monday of the month. The pattern was broken for Wisconsin Public Radio’s fund raiser when often more popular and upbeat guests are featured. During “pledge week,” each show or hour is given a monetary goal. Sure enough, our guys helped Larry Meiller and Jim Packard achieve the $4000 goal for the time period, 11:00 to 12:30. Paradoxically, few people called while the Guys were actually answering questions. They gave away 25 National Weather Service Tornado Spotter Guides and promised more.

The Weather Guys also appeared May 28, their regular appearance on the last Monday of the month. They received calls on “chemtrails,”supposedly chemically caused contrails.

Their June appearance was moderated by Jim Packard on June 25. They covered the effects of Tropical Storm Allison, noting that flooding did an enormous amount of damage. Jim noted that rainfalls of biblical proportions (40 days and nights) had occured in India (1046 inches) and Seaside, OR (only 20 inches). Weather Guys and their listeners also discussed “invisible”rainbows that can be viewed only in the infrared and lightning.

On the Net

NASA’s Earth Observatory Web site featured a MODIS image of the Gulf Stream in May. Liam Gumley provided the image, received via direct broadcast at SSEC on May 2. It was used as an Image of the Day and shows the complex interaction of the sea with the atmosphere via the MODIS 11 micron channel that measures brightness temperature.

Believe It Or Not—In its cartoon of the day for May 8, 2001, Ripley’s featured SSEC's Ice Coring and Drilling Service, hard at work drilling for 100-year-old air. The air was collected for NOAA’s Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory project in Colorado where the air is kept in a special library.
*this comic is no longer archived online.

For More Information SciTech Search

Jeff Quitney is using SSEC’s color global montage in his Web reference site of science Web sites in the Weather section. Quitney’s Quicksand Foundation also provides a search page for scientific topics.

SSEC's latest GOES-8 image was a featured Favorite in May on NetAgra Knowledge Services Web site. Local Web developer and writer Sevie Kenyon occasionally features other SSEC highlights, both on the Web site and in his periodic email newsletter, NetAgra News.

World in Pictures—The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published some fine articles in the paper’s print and online versions on June 4. Science editor John Fauber and photo editor Ernest Mastroianni used SSEC’s vast data archives to illustrate historical events with images from space. Members of SSEC’s McIDAS User Group, Jay Heinzelman and Barry Roth, and Jerrold Robaidek of the Data Center, and others, found images of Washington State’s Mt. St. Helens erupting in 1985, Hurricane Andrew (1992 over Florida), the whole earth from space, and many other historic and striking images. The images make the events come alive, as do the stories of people who witnessed them. Fauber featured SSEC’s Data Center itself in one article showing it as the hub providing information to scientists and others worldwide. Technicians Jerry Robaidek (area supervisor), Janean Hill (archivist) and technician Roseann Spangler were all featured in the article, at work in the state-of-the-art facility.

Practical IDL Programming, by SSEC programmer and MODIS imaging team member Liam Gumley, is being published this month by Morgan Kaufmann’s High Performance Computing division. Subtitled, Creating Effective Data Analysis and Visualization Applications, the book is a 508 page reference work in paperback for the Interactive Data Language (IDL), an environment for data analysis and visualization. Gumley stated that IDL is “an important tool for SSEC researchers”and has become a “valuable complement to established in-house [visualization] applications. …” Gumley added that the work “benefited greatly from external reviews by experts in the field. The reviewers and the editorial staff … at Morgan Kaufmann Publishers have made the book much stronger and better organized.” David Stern, Founder and Chief Technologist of Research Systems Inc. wrote the foreword to the book.

Normal Methane—An SSEC instrument found normal amounts of methane when NASA’s research aircraft, the ER-2, flew over Hutchinson, Kansas in March. City and state officials took advantage of a field experiment carried out in the area to ensure that natural gas levels had receded to normal following January's explosions. The Scanning-High-resolution Interferometer Sounder “found no anomalously high methane amounts,” according to principal investigator Hank Revercomb. Lee Allison of the Kansas Geological Survey requested that NASA make the flight to take advantage of the instrument’s ability to detect trace gases, according to a University of Kansas news release (May 2). The HutchinsonNews.com noted that gas levels continue to be monitored, because, according to Allison, “This instrument isn’t going to detect the small pockets of gas on the surface that might not dissipate.” But City Manager Joe Palacioz said, “There are no leaks, and that’s good news.”An instrument from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab flew in late April to image smaller areas in greater detail. Results will be posted on the Kansas Geological Survey Web site.

Wildfire Monitoring—The work of Elaine Prins (NOAA, at SSEC) and Joleen Feltz (SSEC’s CIMSS) and colleagues in other organizations appears in Global and Regional Wildfire Monitoring: Current Status and Future Plans, a book published by SPB Academic Publishing in The Hague. The chapter by Prins, Feltz et al. presents an "Overview of current and future diurnal active fire monitoring using a suite of international geostationary satellites.” The authors note that, “The geostationary perspective offers the opportunity to capture fires as they occur with the capability for early detection of rapidly growing fires and diurnal high-temporal monitoring of subpixel fire characteristics.”And, “The use and dissemination of geostationary imagery and derived fire products in the Western Hemisphere provide a prototype for future global geostationary fire monitoring efforts.” Authors hope that by 2004, geostationary satellites around the world will provide daily fire information.

In Science News for May 12, Sid Perkins tackles the complicated causes of a rash of Antarctic iceberg calvings. Perkins notes that most glaciologists agree that it is normal for Antarctic ice shelves to shed icebergs periodically and that the current crop was due to break away. He also notes that last season’s iceberg events happened in rather more quick succession than is usual. He uses a satellite image provided by SSEC’s Antarctic Meteorological Research Center where researchers have monitored the calving and breakup of the Ross Ice Shelf’s Iceberg B-15 since March 2000.

Data from the High Speed Photometer (HSP) was used to find evidence of accretion onto a black hole, noted Steven Beckwith, Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, in the STSI Newsletter, March 2001. Joseph Dolan, Goddard Space Flight Center, found the signature of disappearing matter, which was “a series of pulses emitted by clumps of gas as they break away from the innermost stable orbit around a black hole.” The HSP was an original Hubble Space Telescope science instrument designed and built by UW-Madison’s Space Astronomy Laboratory and SSEC. The instrument, used primarily by photometrists, practitioners of an astronomical subspecialty, was removed to make way for corrective mirror optics.

The Madison Capital Times technology reporter Lynn Welch used CIMSS background material in an article about “pinpoint” forecasts. She reviewed programs of various Madison-based weather media on June 14. NOAA research meteorologist Bob Aune explained forecast difficulties to Welch.

Detecting neutrinos—The AMANDA project has detected its first neutrino, as noted in On Wisconsin, Summer 2001. The tiny particles constantly bombard the earth, even zipping right through our bodies, but are extremely hard to detect, so when UW–Madison physicists detected one in October 12, 1997, they were thrilled, but cautious. They have just recently released data from that first detection. AMANDA, embedded in the South Pole, was constructed in 1992. AMANDA’s chief designer, Francis Halzen, Department of Physics, is now willing to say, “We have proven the technique.” Physicists now hope to expand AMANDA’s capabilities to find neutrinos coming from deep space. As principal investigator Robert Morse said, “Now we start the process of discovery.” AMANDA is a project in SSEC’s A3RI, the Antarctic Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Institute.

WIYN Telescope—Terry Devitt, science editor in UW–Madison’s Communications Office, enthusiastically describes astronomical observing at Kitt Peak in “Keeping Their Eyes on the Skies,” appearing in On Wisconsin magazine, Summer 2001. Featured is the WIYN telescope, named for its founding consortium of astronomers from universities of Wisconsin and Indiana as well as Yale and the National Optical Astronomical Observatory. Devitt begins with UW–Madison graduate student astronomers observing on a particularly cloudy yet still fruitful evening. He goes on to narrate astronomers’ pleasures and frustrations, and emphasizes work done with the WIYN, the newest and most advanced telescope on the mountain. Its advanced capabilities are enhanced by its control system, which in part enables the telescope to point precisely, designed and fabricated by SSEC.

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