Dr. John Cassano of Colorado University’s Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences

December 30th, 2007 andrea Posted in news | Comments Off on Dr. John Cassano of Colorado University’s Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences

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One thing I’ve learned about doing a project down here is that you have to take advantage of every opportunity to meet with the scientists because they often are only here for a short time. This requires you to be ready in a moment’s notice. Case in point, Dr. John Cassano arrived two days ago and will probably be leaving next week. I found out John was here this afternoon, and within two hours, met and conducted a fascinating two-camera video interview with him.

John and Dr. Matt Lazzara of the University of Wisconsin lead a team who are here to maintain, update and add to the 70 Automatic Weather Stations in Antarctica and to analyze and update the models being used for weather prediction by aviation meteorology.

It turns out that John is also a storm chaser, chasing tornadoes in the Midwest, so it was really great to get a scientist’s perspective on the importance of experiencing these phenomena physically and not only through weather instruments.

Here is a link to the real-time Antarctic Automatic Weather Station data online. I hope to accompany Shelley Knuth, a member of John’s team, out to a few of the station sites soon:
http://amrc.ssec.wisc.edu/realaws.html

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