Kevin Kloesel
School of Meteorology
The University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK
16 June 2009, 3:30 PM
National Weather Center, Room 1350
120 David L. Boren Blvd.
University of Oklahoma
Norman, OK
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CASA is a multi-sector partnership among academia, industry, and government dedicated to engineering revolutionary weather-sensing networks. These innovative networks will save lives and property by detecting the region of the lower atmosphere currently below conventional radar range - mapping storms, winds, rain, temperature, humidity, and the flow of airborne hazards.
CASA, the center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere, is a prestigious National Science Foundation Engineering Center with over $40 million in federal, university, industry, and state funding. The Center brings together a multidisciplinary group of engineers, computer scientists, meteorologists, sociologists, graduate and undergraduate students, as well as industry and government partners to conduct fundamental research, develop enabling technology, and deploy prototype engineering systems based on a new paradigm: Distributed Collaborative Adaptive Sensing (DCAS) networks.
Today's weather forecasting and warning systems utilize data from high-power, long-range radars that have limited ability to observe the lower part of the atmosphere because of the Earth's curvature. This means that meteorological conditions in the lower troposphere are under-sampled, leaving us with precious little predicting and detecting capability where most weather forms.
CASA will overcome the effects of the Earth's curvature and obstructions such as mountains and buildings by deploying low-cost networks of Doppler radars that operate at short range. Installed on existing rooftops and cell towers dozens of kilometers apart, these small radars will communicate with one another and adjust their sensing modes in response to quickly changing weather and user needs - a dramatic change from current technologies. Up-to-the-second radar information will then be transmitted to the people and organizations that make critical decisions about the weather.
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