News

NCAR Director Everette Joseph celebrated the many accomplishments at NSF NCAR this year. Excerpts from his note to staff are below.

Airborne Phased Array Radar

Years of hard work paid off this year when NSF announced it was awarding an NSF NCAR-led academic and industry team with $91.8 million to complete the design and build of APAR. This next-generation radar will be a phenomenal resource for our community and has the potential to transform our understanding of storm dynamics. While there is much work still to be done, the award marks the transformation from a long-held vision to reality, and it is an example of exactly the kind of work NSF NCAR should be investing in to serve our community and push Earth system science forward. Read more.

Derecho

Blisteringly fast with a flexible infrastructure that better supports artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, NSF NCAR's newest supercomputer, Derecho, is enabling frontier Earth system science. Derecho began operations this year and is already being used for research into hurricanes, geoengineering, climate change in the Arctic, wildfires and air quality, space weather, and more. Read more.

Earth System Prediction and Predictability Across Timescales

As we have continued to focus our efforts on how to provide actionable Earth system science information to address society's grand environmental challenges, it has become increasingly clear that we must address gaps in our existing Earth system prediction capabilities. In the last year, NSF NCAR has made significant progress toward creating a roadmap with our community that will define a path for us to address these gaps, working toward seamless Earth system prediction across space and time.  Read more.

Chromospheric Magnetism Explorer (MDEx)

This year, NASA selected an NSF NCAR-led proposal for a solar-observing spacecraft to receive $2 million in funding for further study. This is a landmark win for NSF NCAR, which has never previously led an Explorer-sized spacecraft mission. CMEx would deliver a never-before-seen view of our Sun's magnetic field and provide a rich dataset for researchers interested in better predicting solar storms and their likely impacts on Earth. Read more.

SOS & M2HATS

From monitoring springtime snowpack in Colorado's frozen mountains to measuring turbulent winds during Nevada's scorching summer, NSF NCAR staff successfully facilitated two field campaigns this year that showcase our ability to support the science in extreme circumstances. The Sublimation of Snow (SOS) campaign was based in Crested Butte, Colorado, and measured rates of snow sublimation. The Multi-point Monin-Obukhov similarity horizontal array turbulence study (M2HATS) took place in Tonopah, Nevada, and gathered boundary layer data to improve the way models simulate turbulence and, therefore, predict severe weather.