Measuring and Modeling Measuring and Modeling: timeline In their own words: Joachim Kuettner In their own words: T.N. Krishnamurti

UCAR at 40 Who We Are Introduction One Planet, One Atmosphere Between Sun and Earth •Measuring and Modeling When Weather Matters Most Spreading the Word Knowledge for All Looking toward the Future UCAR at a Glance List of acronyms

1960s

1963 • NSBF Launch The National Scientific Balloon Facility goes into full-scale operation. Located in Palestine, Texas, to take advantage of favorable prevailing winds and air traffic patterns, the NSBF carries out 83 flights in its first year.

1964 • Wings in the Skies With a leased Beech Queen Air 80, the NCAR Research Aviation Facility opens for business. Strong demand from university scientists results in the leasing of two additional Queen Airs by 1966, with more aircraft to follow.

1965 • CDC 6600 Installation of a CDC 6600 computer from Control Data Corporation begins. Though extremely limited by today's standards, the machine allows NCAR and university scientists to carry out some of the first modeling of long-term global circulation. The 6600 is followed in 1971 by a CDC 7600.

1972 • Radar Progress With radar development headed by David Atlas and Robert Serafin, the National Hail Research Experiment (NHRE) becomes the first program to successfully deploy more than one Doppler radar. Instruments from NOAA and the University of Chicago are soon joined by two cloud-physics radars created at NCAR. Highly portable, the new radars are among the first to include real-time color displays.

1976 • Automated Instruments The first generation of Portable Automated Mesonet (PAM) stations is deployed near Grover, Colorado, for NHRE. These lightweight, low-powered weather sensors and their successors become a mainstay of field programs over the next quarter century.

1977 • First CRAY NCAR accepts the first production model of the CRAY-1 supercomputer. The five-ton machine is lowered through the ceiling of a newly built underground computing center. Subsequent machines from Cray Research dominate NCAR computing into the 1990s.

1985 • CLASS Act Radiosonde support for field projects becomes more accessible with the creation of the Cross-Chain Loran Atmospheric Sounding System. CLASS provides scientists with their first real-time data from a network of research-quality atmospheric soundings.

1986 • A Place for Data NCAR upgrades its mass storage systems with a set of high-density magnetic disks and cassettes linked to NCAR's Cray computers. Some 14 trillion bits of data are moved to the new facility in one of the largest data transfers ever accomplished in the research world to that point. Starting in 1989, a StorageTek robotic silo allows off-line data to be mounted and accessed automatically.

1986 • Airborne Radar Planning begins for a new Doppler radar to be mounted in the tail section of the NSF/NCAR Electra aircraft. The Electra Doppler Radar, built in collaboration with the French government, makes its debut in the winter of 1992–93 at the Tropical Ocean and Global Atmosphere Program's Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment.

1988 • Graphic Atmosphere A new visualization laboratory helps scientists depict their results in three-dimensional, animated form. Meanwhile, the NCAR Graphics program, developed earlier in the decade, broadens its user base with a UNIX- compatible version.

1990 • Following Fluxes A new set of automated instrument packages allows sampling of heat, momentum, and chemical fluxes between the ground and atmosphere. The Atmosphere-Surface Turbulent Exchange Research (ASTER) facility helps university scientists to examine the atmosphere's lowest kilometer with far more precision than before.

1993 • Applying Statistics The NSF-supported Geophysical Statistics Project begins. GSP brings statisticians (many of them postdoctoral researchers) to NCAR, where they work with atmospheric scientists to develop statistical techniques relevant to studying the Earth system.

1996 • Introducing S-Pol NCAR's first dual-polarization Doppler radar, S-Pol, is completed. Portable and powerful, S-Pol allows hail to be discerned from rain by separately measuring the horizontal and vertical components of returned signals.

1997 • More Data by Dropsonde The precision of parachute-borne weather measurements increases nearly a hundredfold with the advent of the GPS dropsonde. With Global Positioning System technology helping to track its location, the dropsonde is used to measure temperature, moisture, and air pressure and infer wind speeds every 5 to 10 meters (16 to 33 feet) as it descends from a research aircraft. In 1998, the GPS dropsonde retrieves the first detailed data from within the eyewall of a hurricane.

1998 • Five Decades Revisited After seven years of painstaking work, NCAR and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction release a reanalysis of 50 years of global weather data. By standardizing the analysis techniques and weeding out erroneous data, a team led by NCAR's Roy Jenne creates a 2.5-terabyte (2.5 trillion byte) archive unique to the discipline. Scientists in 38 countries order more than 3,500 subsets of the reanalysis on CD-ROM in its first two years.

1999 • Parallel Paradigm Computing at NCAR moves toward massively parallel processing with the arrival of the IBM RS/6000 SP. The 167-node machine more than doubles the computing center's peak capacity. Subsequent upgrades in the year to follow boost the center's sustained capacity to 70 gigaflops (billions of floating-point operations), more than ten times the 1995 capacity.