FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  Dec. 6, 2016
 
NORMAN – The University of Oklahoma has been awarded a five-year, $166 million grant by NASA to advance understanding of Earth’s natural exchanges of carbon between the land, atmosphere and ocean.
The primary goals of the Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory, led by Berrien Moore, OU Vice President for Weather and Climate Programs, are to monitor plant health and vegetation stress throughout the Americas, and to examine the natural sources and processes that control carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane in the atmosphere.
“To say this is an extraordinary achievement by Dr. Berrien Moore and our research team is an understatement,” said OU President David L. Boren. “The grant is one of the most exceptional in the history of the University and is testimony to the outstanding national stature of our research team. I cannot think of a more exciting way to observe the holiday season than with the announcement of this remarkable grant.”
The mission will launch on a commercial communications satellite to make observations over the Americas from an orbit of approximately 22,000 miles above the equator.
The OU-led geoCARB team will build an advanced payload employing otherwise unused launch and spacecraft capacity to advance science and provide societal benefit.
Mission collaborators include the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California; SES Government Solutions Company in Reston, Virginia; the Colorado State University in Fort Collins; and NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Colleagues and laboratories from France, Australia and Mexico also are contributing to the project.
The mission was competitively selected from 15 proposals submitted to the agency’s second Earth Venture - Mission announcement of opportunity for small orbital investigations of the Earth system.
 
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Robert D. Palmer, Ph.D., University of Oklahoma meteorology professor, associate vice president for research and executive director of the Advanced Radar Research Center, has been named an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Fellow. Among a select group of recipients recommended for the prestigious honor, Palmer is being recognized for contributions to atmospheric and meteorological radar science.

"Professor Robert Palmer has brought distinction to the University of Oklahoma in numerous ways: scientifically, academically and through service that reaches a wide array of private and public sector activities. His most recent and great honor of being made a fellow in the institute adds to this record of distinction to OU. We are particularly thrilled since this also brings much deserved distinction to Bob Palmer," said Berrien Moore, vice president for Weather and Climate Programs, director of the National Weather Center and dean of the OU College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences.

While at OU, Palmer has been deeply committed to providing students a rigorous education in weather radar. In close collaboration with colleagues in the Norman weather radar community, Palmer led the development of a unique interdisciplinary curriculum in radar meteorology. Soon after joining OU, Palmer established the Advanced Radar Research Center, which is rapidly gaining recognition as one of the world's strongest academic centers in radar meteorology.

In recent years, Palmer has focused on the application of advanced radar signal processing techniques to observations of severe weather, particularly related to phased-array radars and other innovative system designs. He has been published widely in the area of radar remote sensing of the atmosphere, with an emphasis on generalized imaging problems, spatial filter design, and clutter mitigation using advanced array and signal processing techniques.

Palmer, an OU graduate with a doctoral degree in electrical engineering, is actively engaged with his profession through involvement with the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. Internationally, he has been committed to the development of a vibrant exchange program with Kyoto University in Japan, focused on studies of the atmosphere using modeling and advanced remote sensing methods. He has received several awards for his research and teaching activities and is an American Meteorological Society Fellow as well.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Grade of Fellow is conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one- percent of the total voting membership. Fellow is the highest grade of the institute's membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.

When a hail storm moved through Fort Worth, Texas on May 5, 1995, it battered the highly populated area with hail up to 4 inches in diameter and struck a local outdoor festival known as the Fort Worth Mayfest.

The Mayfest storm was one of the costliest hailstorms in U.S history, causing more than $2 billion in damage and injuring at least 100 people.

Scientists know that storms with a rotating updraft on their southwestern sides -- which are particularly common in the spring on the U.S. southern plains -- are associated with the biggest, most severe tornadoes and also produce a lot of large hail. However, clear ideas on how they form and how to predict these events in advance have proven elusive.

A team based at University of Oklahoma (OU) working on the Severe Hail Analysis, Representation and Prediction (SHARP) project works to solve that mystery, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF).  Read More

Congratulations Lance Leslie and Mike Richman

on your paper co-authored by Hamish A. Ramsay titled Seasonal Tropical Cyclone Predictions Using Optimized Combinations of ENSO Regions: Application to the Coral Sea Basin reaching #1 in J Climate and #3 in all AMS Journals! We are so proud of you!

Click here for the link to the paper.

The Cloud-Map team, which consists of divisions from the universities of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kentucky and Nebraska, is looking to create a tailored system for scientists, incorporating different elements of technology team members have previously developed into a low-cost package.The idea is to replace the role that weather balloons have, but in a mobile way so weather can be followed and tracked to better predict when and where it will develop....

Click here for more