Susan Solomon. (Photo by Bob Bumpas.)
While working on her doctorate in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, Susan spent the years 1979-80 at NCAR working with Ray Roble and Paul Crutzen on her dissertation. She's spent the last 15 years at NOAA's Aeronomy Lab on Broadway doing pioneering work on stratospheric ozone depletion. Susan often collaborates with Rolando Garcia and other ACD scientists; she doesn't expect that to stop with her new administrative duties. "I'm really looking forward to being involved in the science of the whole division. I think Rolando and I can now claim to have one of the best two-dimensional models of the stratosphere anywhere. But I'm also interested in the troposphere and looking forward to interacting with scientists in ACD and CGD."
Susan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Among her many honors are the NOAA Gold Medal and the Henry Houghton Award from the American Meteorological Society. She is also a fellow of the AMS and the American Geophysical Union and an NCAR affiliate scientist.
"This is the end of the METEOR SEE program," says Tom. "We knew there was a risk for this mission, but it is sad nonetheless to end this way. However, we've gained valuable experience in fabricating and testing satellite instruments at HAO, plus we have software code for both flight microprocessor and data processing that can be partially recycled for the TIMED SEE program." TIMED--NASA's Thermosphere, Ionosphere, and Mesosphere: Energy and Dynamics mission--is scheduled for launch in 1999.
RAP's guidance system uses data from surface weather stations, weight-sensing snow gauges, and Doppler radar to create a dual display. Zoomable radar imagery and overlays are on one side, with text and graphics on snowfall accumulation and surface weather on the other. To follow the movement of snow bands, users may select a movie loop of the past 60 minutes of radar returns and a projection of the next 30 minutes. Data on the liquid equivalent of snowfall totals can be used to help schedule deicing. In a paper presented earlier this year, RAP showed that icing risk depends more on the liquid equivalent of snowfall than on the snow accumulation itself.
"O'Hare gets snowfall that is typically wetter and heavier than at Denver," says Roy Rasmussen, project coordinator. "It also uses different procedures than Denver for handling aircraft deicing and runway plowing. Since O'Hare is representative of East Coast airports in volume and weather types, this test will allow us to significantly extend the usefulness of our current system." Users at O'Hare will evaluate such questions as whether delays can be avoided by better deicing scheduling through use of the RAP system, and whether snow gauges installed by NCAR a few kilometers upstream of snow-band generation points will provide useful guidance on conditions that follow at the airport.