As part of CSWR's committment to supporting radar meteorology education, the DOWs have deployed to numerous universities throughout the United States (see map below.) This has afforded students the opportunity to design and conduct radar experiments and have hands-on experience analyzing DOW data.
Want to request the DOWs for your own educational project? Click here!
Click on the colored dots below or scroll down to read more about individual projects.
Dr. Jeff Trapp, professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Purdue University, requested one of the CSWR mobile weather research radars for deployment to West Lafayette, Indiana from October 21 through November 18, 2009. Small student teams planned several research projects related to the occurrence of isolated severe and non-severe thunderstorms, mesoscale convective systems, frontal rain bands and lake-effect snowfall.
The University of Nebraska DOW Education and Outreach (UNDEO) project was conducted in November of 2008. UNDEO was an NSF-funded collaboration between the Department of Geosciences at the University of Nebraska ?Lincoln and the Center for Severe Weather Research that allowed for a 15-day on-campus deployment of a DOW for classroom-instruction and hands-on experience.
The Pennsylvania Mobile Radar Experiment (PAMREX) used the DOW radars in the fall months of 2003 and 2004 to study a wide variety of phenomena, such as the interaction of fronts and thunderstorms with ridges and valleys, terrain-induced atmospheric circulations, and phenomena owing to atmospheric interactions with Lake Erie. The complex terrain of Pennsylvania can produce atmospheric circulations capable of triggering thunderstorms, in addition to influencing already mature thunderstorms and their attendant severe weather. Surface temperature roughness differences between Lake Erie and the land surface of Pennsylvania routinely affect small-scale weather as well with 搇ake effect?snow bands being perhaps the most widely known of these lake-induced phenomena.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been granted the request for a 21-day campus deployment in November 2010 of a DOW for classroom-instruction, outreach, and research. The classroom-instruction will involve a class on Radar Meteorology, collecting and analyzing data from the DOW, gaining real-world experience. Outreach efforts will be in the form of tours of the facility given to hundreds of undergraduates and 4-6 undergraduates will use the data for Capstone Undergraduate Research Experience, in Spring 2011 following the deployment.
Want to request the DOWs for your own educational project? Click here!
