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Mission...
The Field Observing Facilities Support
group (FOFS) oversees and provides support for a portion of NSSL's observing
facilities. Included are mobile, deployable, and fixed-site facilities
for use by researchers. The mobile facilities are particularly well suited
for intercepting and moving with storms and weather systems.
Observational facilities include:
- Mobile and deployable laboratories for making surface measurements and receiving upper air balloon soundings, including standard radiosondes, electric field, and other parameters. Mobile ballooning based out of the mobile labs allows instrumented balloons to be released in a variety of severe and hazardous weather in both cold and warm seasons.
- GPS Advanced Upper air Sounding systems (GAUS). NSSL possesses 3 complete systems that can be deployed in either fix based or mobile mode. Vaisala RS-92 SGP sondes are required. They provide atmospheric variables every second, including temperature, pressure, relative humidity, dew point, wind speed and direction, and precise 3-dimensional location. Mobile mode allows launching sondes then and tracking while driving away to a next launch site.
- Mobile Mesonet System (i.e., vehicle roof mounted, surface weather instrumentation) designed for intercept and data acquisition on tornadic and other severe storms, and landfalling hurricanes. The roof mounted instrumentation provides temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed and direction, vehicle orientation and precise vehicle location by means of GPS and a telemetry system for data transmission. A Freewave data communication system allows vehicles to automatically report data to a central command vehicle in real time. Roof mounted racks exist for instrumenting up to 10 cars at one time.
- The 11-station Oklahoma lightning mapping array (LMA) that provides high resolution, three-dimensional mapping of all types of lightning over west central Oklahoma and two-dimensional mapping over most of Oklahoma.
- Mobile Doppler C-band (SMARTR-1 and SMARTR-2 and X-band radar that are designed for close proximity study of moving tornadic storms and hurricanes.
Support and services
- All support activities are done in close collaboration
with NSSL's principal scientists and researchers in the project. Support
includes:
- On-site support for base systems and field systems during specific research programs.
- Maintenance, repair, and modification of on-going, operational systems.
- Upgrade and improvement of existing systems.
- Design and integration of new systems.
- Providing expertise in selection and use of base and field facilities and data collection systems to scientists, undergraduate and graduate level students.
- Providing expertise in interpreting data quality from data collection systems.
- Research on and selection of new state of the art sensors for integration into our existing facilities.
- FOFS also collaborates with scientists and engineers from other government agencies and universities on design and construction of research instrumentation for joint field programs, e.g., VORTEX, IHOP, TELEX, etc.
