CASA Summer Outreach

CASA Summer Outreach Reaches Thousands

Over the summer, members of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) were hard at work organizing outreach activities to benefit CASA's students, industrial partners, and the general public. Through these outreach activities, CASA's students were given opportunities to participate in various events to spread the word about CASA's revolutionary research into observing, understanding, tracking, and predicting severe weather, while also saving lives. As part of its core R&D effort, CASA has developed a powerful new network of low-cost, polarimetric, Doppler radars that can detect tornadoes at much lower altitudes than existing radars, thus tracking them as they actually form and touch down.

For several years now, CASA's rural Oklahoma test bed has demonstrated the ability to track twisters more accurately and alert emergency personnel earlier than ever before. Then, this past spring, a CASA radar on the Amherst campus helped issue alerts when tornadoes touched down right in our own back yards. 

As a National Science Foundation sponsored Engineering Research Center (ERC), CASA carries out a mission that goes far beyond its groundbreaking R&D. "One of the goals of the ERC program is to train the next generation of engineers," explains Janice Brickley, the Administrative Director of CASA. "By participating in research, education/outreach activities, and industrial collaboration, young engineers learn to be innovative leaders.

CASA's Education and Outreach Director Paula Rees and Innovation Manager Apoorva Bajaj teamed up to plan and execute a busy summer of outreach activities. The outreach initially focused on about 11 CASA students from UMass Amherst but ultimately engaged some 27 undergraduates, 25 master's students, and 31 doctoral students from UMass and three other CASA partner universities: the University of Oklahoma, Colorado State University, and the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez (UPRM).

"These students are our ambassadors carrying the message of our research," says Bajaj. "They are able to communicate the research in new ways given their experience working together to understand the weather and developing systems-level approaches to solving problems. They bring that knowledge to the world at large."

The first outreach event was Extreme Weather Day, held at the Museum of Science in Boston on June 11 and aimed at explaining weather technology to the general public. The CASA team was led by Prof. Steve Frasier and Prof. Mike Zink, who each gave presentations, and participants included two undergraduate students, two undergraduate interns, and two graduate students, all doing research at CASA.  An important member of the CASA cast was Robert Palumbo, a Raytheon systems engineer enrolled in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Ph.D. program through the Raytheon Advanced Studies Program, who directed several hands-on demonstrations for visitors. The demonstrations involved not only CASA's radar technologies, but also the infrasound sensors CASA is investigating for detecting tornadoes from the very low-frequency sounds they make. The infrasound research has been enabled by the Jerome M. Paros Fund for Measurement and Environmental Sciences Research, created with a gift of $2 million and currently supporting CASA.

http://www-new.ecs.umass.edu/news/casa-summer-outreach-reaches-thousands