| The Engineering Research
Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA), funded
by NSF and headquartered at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMass),
is developing technologies that overcome limitations of radar due to the
curvature of the earth. The ultimate goal is to dramatically increase
the warning time and forecast for hazardous weather events in the U.S.
As with other ERCs, primary objectives include outreach – in the U.S. and
internationally – to students, academic, and business leaders in addition
to the pursuit of research advances.
CASA graduate students and
researchers have actively sought opportunities to engage in research at
a number of institutions outside the U.S., and this year, three International
Research and Education in Engineering (IREE) awards supported collaborative
research between CASA researchers and their international partners. Colorado
State University’s Yanting Wang made two trips to the National Research
Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED) in Japan to
exchange views on system architecture and applications. Victoria Manfredi,
a computer science doctoral candidate at UMass, spent five months at The
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, exploring
several aspects of networked sensing systems. Jorge Trabal, an Electrical
and Computer Engineering Ph.D. student at UMass, spent four months at the
Marshall Radar Observatory of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, working
on detection, quantitative precipitation estimation, and evaluation issues.
Furthermore, CASA co-sponsored
the International Symposium on X-band Radar Networks in Tskuba, Japan,
in conjunction with NSF and NIED. More than 200 people attended the
symposium, which focused on the benefits of deploying X-band radars for
quantitative precipitation estimation and for sensing severe storms, as
well as featuring CASA research and presentations by NSF officials.
As a result of the conference, CASA is developing concepts for another
collaboration with NIED, which is already a CASA partner. |
