NCAR & UCAR News

3D-printed weather stations
June 2, 2016
Scientists have successfully installed the first wave of low-cost weather stations in Zambia with 3D-printed parts.
3D-printed weather stations help developing countries: Kenyan farmer
UCAR to support EarthCube
May 26, 2016
The NSF initiative will foster collaborations among geoscientists by creating a common infrastructure for researchers to collect, access, analyze, share, and visualize all forms of data and related resources.
UCAR to support EarthCube: Computer simulation of Hurricane Sandy
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News from UCAR Members

Mining social media can help improve disaster response efforts

Leveraging publicly available social media posts could help disaster response agencies quickly identify impacted areas in need of assistance, according to a Penn State-led team of researchers.

Pennsylvania State University
A and B are satellite images of a flooded road in Colorado after the 2013 floods. C was taken by Civil Air Patrol and shows the same submerged road, identifying with a square a stranded truck. D is the image C after it has been classified for water pixels. E is a close-up of C, showing the stranded truck. F is the same truck in a Flickr post. Image: Guido Cervone / Penn State
New Insights into Solar Flares

Astronomers have made a significant step toward confirming a proposed explanation for how solar flares accelerate charged particles to speeds nearly that of light.

Harvard University
Particle acceleration in a solar flare. (Credit: Alexandra Angelich, NRAO/AUI/NSF)
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In Brief

Planes, ships and satellites: Investigating air quality in Korea
May 12, 2016 | Scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research are on the ground in South Korea as part of a field campaign to investigate the region's air quality.
Pollution blows across the Korean Peninsula
Wrangling observations into models
April 4, 2016 | If scientists could directly measure the properties of all the water throughout the world’s oceans, they wouldn’t need help from NCAR scientist Alicia Karspeck. But since large expanses of the oceans are beyond the reach of observing instruments, Karspeck’s work is critical for those who want estimates of temperature, salinity, and other properties of water around the globe.
Data assimilation: Weather forecast map of southeastern US
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Just Published

Population trumps climate and carbon in shaping the future of wildfires
May 23, 2016 | All other things being equal, a warming climate would likely expand the amount of land scorched each year by wildfires across the globe.  But all other things aren't equal. A new study by a team of scientists, including Leiwen Jiang at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), found that the future pattern of population growth, not climate change, is likely to be the dominant factor in determining whether the amount of land burned by fires increases or decreases this century.
Population and future fire: photo of fire burning across a grassland
Super-resolution solar model achieves order out of chaos
March 29, 2016 | Over the past few decades, computer models of the Sun’s interior have matured, showing that turbulent flows of plasma create a chaotic magnetic tangle. And after observing the Sun's surface for hundreds of years, scientists know that order emerges from that tangle in the form of the solar cycle.
An image from a high-res model of the Sun
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Perspective

Forecast for big data: Mostly cloudy
May 31, 2016 | The rise of big data has big implications for the advancement of science. It also has big implications for the clogging of bandwidth. The growing deluge of geoscience data is in danger of maxing out the existing capacity to deliver that information to researchers. In response, scientific institutions are experimenting with storing data in the cloud, where researchers can readily get the relatively small portion of the data they actually need.
An image of an Amazon Web Services data center.
Sizing up cyclones
May 18, 2016 | In early July 2005, Hurricane Dennis, a Category 3 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, was bearing down on the Gulf Coast. Anyone paying attention would have been forgiven for having a foreboding sense of déjà vu. 
ECEP hurricane damage index: Satellite imagery of Hurricane Ivan
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