9UNP0193SD_Phillips_Menzel_WordPress

- Welcome to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. Tonight, we hope to have some fun with you and share with you some information about the city of Madison, the history of meteorological satellites, and the unique role that one of our faculty, Verner Suomi, had in all of this. We all work at the Space Science and Engineering Center. And by we, I mean myself, Paul Menzel, Jean Phillips and Rick Coors is the master of the globe, the wizard really. We are going to divide this presentation up into a few slides for myself, covering some of the history. This is a little bit of a commercial because we want to interest you into the Suomi Museum, that is in its infancy right now. We want you to be aware of it and spread the word that there should be a museum with some of the artifacts from Vern Suomi's career And Jean will talk about that. And then at the very end, we'll have some illustrations on what we call the magic globe. At any rate, what I would like to do is wind you back almost 50 years, and talk a little bit about the origins of the satellite program, and how Vern Suomi had a critical role in this. 

And of course we're all aware that there was a bit of a space race. Some of that will be covered, but very quickly, we'll get from the space race to the very peaceful uses of satellites for imaging the earth, to seeing the weather, and to understanding a little bit more about the environment and our role in that environment. So my talk is divided up into the early history, the inventor, Vern Suomi, some of the global experiments that were coordinated by Vern using his technology and other people's technologies, a look back at 40 years of weather in motion, and then just a word of introduction to the Suomi Science Museum. The international geophysical year is something that was orchestrated after World War II, when we tried to do peaceful things together as a people on the planet. It was intended to be an advancement of the earth sciences. And it was announced in the middle 1950s. It was supposed to last from the middle of '57 until the end of '58. Those are 19's. In preparation for the international geophysical year, both the United States and Russia wanted to have a technology show. So they both announced, United States in July of '55 and Russia in August of '55, that they would make a satellite contribution to the IGY. 

And then, you know it, the race was on. Those of you who are old enough, and I see gray hairs older than my own here-- On October 4, a day before my birthday, Sputnik was launched, and the way we view the earth was changed. Because all the sudden, you had a satellite that could cover the globe. Because we weren't first, we redoubled our efforts. We had two parallel programs, the Explorer program and the Vanguard program launching satellites. One of the teams included Wernher von Braun, and the other was an Army team. But at any rate, we had a lot of launches. We needed a lot, because our batting average was less than a baseball player's. But at any rate, we did have some successes. And I'll be showing you some of those. 

But parenthetically, at the same time, we also, through the IGY, got our first glimpse at the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. Dave Keeling was funded by the IGY to start the carbon dioxide record. And that goes back to 1957. So we have 50 years of records from Monoloa of the carbon dioxide concentration. So the CO2 warming, as part of the record is right there from the IGY, that came after World War II. Here's a picture of Sputnik. As I said, this was an eye shaker for the United States. Lots of kids in school were vectored into the science after the Russians launched Sputnik. I was one of those kids, so I think that I can cite that Sputnik changed my life. This is a listing of some of the Sputnik Vanguard Explorer events. 

Now if you look at it carefully the word "fail" appears quite often. Launch fails. Vanguard try fails. Then you have fails. Fails. Fails for the fourth time, fifth time. As I said, the batting average wasn't great. But we've already covered October 4, 1957, which was Russia's first success. Then December 6, not too far after that, we tried to launch Vanguard 3. Test vehicle is what TV stands for. 

That explodes on the launch pad. I put that in bold, because there's a personal note personal to that. December 6th was Vern Suomi's birthday. He was 41 years old that day. And Vanguard 3 carried his instrument. So he didn't make it the first time. But not too far after that, two months later, January 31, we had our first big success where the Explorer 1 carried Van Allen's experiment to look at the cosmic radiation belts, cosmic rays, and discovered the Van Allen radiation belts. We go down quite a bit after that, with quite a few failures on both sides, but Sputnik 3, a very large satellite, carried a lot of stuff. Unfortunately the tape recorder failed, so little things could throw big things off. But that was an indication that the rockets in Russia were quite mature. 

At this time, we were still looking for a major success to follow on Explorer 1. And Dwight Eisenhower indicated that he wanted a space agency in the United States to pursue peaceful uses of outer space via satellites. And that was a very, very big decision, because NASA went into the civilian realm rather than the military realm. So a lot of the beautiful things that we're aware of from NASA over the last 50 years, are because Dwight Eisenhower made that announcement July 29. Now if you think about it, July 29 was a couple days ago. That was a 50th birthday for NASA. So if you see someone from NASA, you can say happy 50th. At any rate, here are some pictures. Vanguard 3 failed. Vern Suomi and Bob Parent, who was his engineering colleague who helped him do just about everything with satellites that he did. 

The two of them were quite a team. They had built this instrument that went up in this rocket, and this is not a picture of a successful launch. 
(laughter)
 There's a lot of things going wrong here. And what we don't have is a picture of this going boom. But as I said, Vern was 41 that day, but he was still very young at heart, and had a lot more satellite launches to come. The successful launch came on January 31. William Pickering, James Van Allen and Wernher von Braun, from left to right, hoist a model of it. They had quite a celebration, because this was our first successful launch. And not only was it a successful launch, the early Sputnik's really carried nothing, or a dog. 

We carried an instrument that brought back some scientific data. We discovered the Van Allen belt with Explorer 1. So this is about four months after the Russian success. So the race was on, but the programs are really parallel in strength until, as I indicated, it became evident that the Russians had larger boosters. Here's a picture of Dwight Eisenhower, whom I give a lot of credit for establishing NASA in the civilian domain. And then here's Explorer 7. That wasn't on the chart you saw before. As I said, Vern was 41 on the previous launch failure. But a couple years later then, October 13, 1959, he had a successful experiment. This is considered to be the start of meteorological satellites. 

Van Allen's is not a meteorological satellite, because it was looking away from the earth. Meteorological, to us, means you're looking at the earth. This was an instrument that looked at the earth, and also looked at the sun, and measured the net energy balance. He wanted to know how much energy the earth was emitting, and how much was it receiving from the sun. And over a year, if that doesn't balance out to zero, we're going to change rather rapidly. So this was a very important experiment. It was launched into polar orbit. And polar orbit is neat, because it gives you global coverage. A satellite goes in a fixed circle in space, and the earth rotates underneath it. So with the earth's rotation, each time the satellite comes by it gets a different piece of the earth. 

And you're going to see that on the globe later on. But this then gave you a global map of the energy balance of the earth. Solar energy coming in, thermal energy going out. So this was a big deal. So October 13, 1959, next year, 50th anniversary of meteorological satellites. And Vern Suomi is given the title as the "Father of Meteorological Satellites" because of this. And I guess Bob Parent should be the brother of meteorological satellites. At any rate, here is the beginning of CO2 charts that the IGY also funded. And you can see we had this annual cycle where leaves would rot, and you have more CO2, and then you would have CO2 uptake as we green the earth. And the annual cycle, mostly by the northern hemisphere. 

We now have a 50-year record of that, that started at the same time we started with meteorological satellites. Well, the net flux radiometer very soon gave way to just, let's take pictures of the earth. And we had rocket pictures. Robert Goddard of Goddard's Space Flight Center fame, had sent rocket's up but they never gave you a global picture. Once we were able to launch these satellites into the polar orbit, we were able to start getting polar pictures. In fact, the start of the meteorological weather satellite pictures, and NOAA takes a great pride in this, the first satellite was launched April Fool's day, 1960. And by now, we had learned how to make bigger buses, so we had quite a bit of tonnage on our space craft also, just like Sputnik 3. And we started getting pictures back like this. And this is probably doing it justice. I haven't done anything to make this picture look worse. 

It was pretty tough to get these pictures stick together. Usually, you had sensors that didn't agree. You had striping. So that's pretty much what you put these rockets up for, to get pretty grainy picture. Then you would get a mosaic of these pictures, and you would try to make meteorological sense out of them. And you would see some weather patterns that only a true meteorologist could interpret. And then you would take this mosaic of pictures, and you would change your drawing of the weather pattern. So we still relied on drawings, because our pictures from space weren't of the quality we quite wanted, but they had a lot of information. And the hand-drawn maps were readjusted. You moved the front a little bit so that the clouds would agree in location. 

There was a fair amount of impact early on from the weather satellites. A global mosaic, even today, a practiced eye has trouble making sense of it, but these are the things people were spending a lot of time in dark rooms developing pictures, and moving them so that the earth edges weren't in disagreement, the continents lined up right, and then you could get some sense of weather patterns. Needless to say, it was pretty tedious work, but important work. The visible pictures, which you could only get in daytime, were soon supplemented with infrared. With infrared, you'd have day and night imagery. And Nimbus 1 carried the first infrared detector. I'm showing you here a picture of what came on Nimbus 2. You were able to tell thermal changes in space. In other words, from one location to another. So day and night feature mapping was possible in 1964. 

And soon, we got sophisticated instruments up there. Rudy Hannel put an spectrometer, an FTS system on there. That's fancy words for somebody that could parse a spectrum in very small spectral intervals. And the reason you want to do that, is you could then separate out the sections of the earth where radiation from the earth is disturbed by carbon dioxide. That would be this big bite out of the spectrum. Disturbed by ozone, this part of the spectrum. Disturbed by water vapor. Every time radiation from the earth is disturbed, that means it's radiation is not escaping. That means it comes back to the earth in re-emission. So these big bites out the spectrum are pretty important for measuring the net flux, which Suomi measured, and also determining to what extent extra carbon would make a difference in whether we heat up or cool down. 

So Rudy Hannel's experiment in 1969 gave us the first information about the earth emitted spectrum. That's beautiful data, even by today's standards, but it also gave us some ideas about how we could start probing the vertical structure of the atmosphere. When you are in what we call a window region not affected by any of those gases, you can see the surface of the earth. When you go into the carbon dioxide absorption band, you can start probing the more opaque parts of the spectrum, you only see the higher part of the atmosphere, or troposphere in this case. So you can start getting a sense of the thermal changes as you go vertically upward in the atmosphere. It's a large part of radiative transfer and remote sensing science now. I went a little bit off the side, because I spent about 30 years trying to understand that myself. And I'll show you a few more pictures about that later on. But the lucky part was with these vertical profiles of temperature and moisture, we were able to influence weather forecasts almost immediately. It was pretty much a lucky shot, because if you've done it four or five times, the forecast would have degraded in the beginning. 

But we hit that one out of five times where the Nimbus sounder measure had immediate positive impact, and we could go right up to capital hill and say we need more of this. That was lucky. Part of the reason it doesn't always have impact, it takes a while for a weather prediction model to get used to new data. But here you have something where halved the error in a three-day forecast. That was huge. We don't do that anymore. We maybe have a five to ten percent improvement with a new instrument. Over time, numerical weather prediction models have worked pretty hard on getting used to satellite data, and to witness this, is the top line here is what we get at day three in the northern hemisphere. An anomaly correlation means, how much are you matching the shape of the weather pattern? How much are your hands overlapping? 

This is a hundred percent anomaly correlation at three days. If it's a little bit like this, the anomaly correlation is off, because you didn't match the patterns exactly. So when we go here from 85% anomaly to 95%, that's an improvement. This is from 1981 to 2003, so a lot of numerical weather prediction model improvements have occurred in the northern hemisphere, where you have a lot of other observations. We launch balloons. We have a lot of people that take observations. These all go into the model. What's more striking is the bottom line, which is the southern hemisphere, which relies almost totally on satellite data, has caught up. The forecasts for weather in the southern hemisphere are as good as they are in the northern hemisphere, relying totally on satellite data, with a few ground observations from ship and man. So there's a big success story here in forecast, even though we still sometimes doubt whether the weather forecast for three days in Madison was any better than it was 50 years ago. 

I have the proof right here in this slide that it is. At any rate, I covered polar orbiters. Vern Suomi wasn't just a polar orbiter guy, he was also a geostationary orbit guy. And again, near his birthday that seemed to be where all the magnetic orbs came correct for him. On the 5th of December, the Chicago Tribune makes a cautious announcement of a pending new weather eye. We were going to try to launch something into orbit that has a 24-hour period. That's a special orbit, because the earth rotates 24 hours. So if you put the satellite up in a 24 hour orbit at the equator, it will always be at the same spot in the sky. That was the idea of the geostationary orbit. So on December 5, they said we're going to try. 

On December 7, the Tribune declares that a multipurpose moonlet has been successfully launched. I haven't heard satellites called a moonlet, since then but I kind of like it. At any rate, geostationary launch means you have to go out 45 times further than a polar orbiter. So you need a bigger rocket. You need a lot of stuff. And you need to be able to really put a lot of propulsion to it. This is an animation here. But getting the geostationary orbit, I've watched one of these launches, it really gets pretty exciting. A lot of the stuff that is supposed to fall off, does fall off. But you're quite sure when you're watching it, that your instrument has just fallen off. 

(laughter)
 But no, it was just a booster. If you're lucky, you get into orbit. And in this case, it was a very beautiful launch back in 1966. 
- There are two kinds of satellites. Those which are called low orbiters, at about 200 or 400-kilometers. They go around earth like this in about two hours’ time. And those which you are much more familiar with, is the geostationary satellite, which is way up high, approximately equal to the circumference of the earth that is way up here. And as the earth turns, so does the satellite, with it. And under those circumstances, the satellite appears stationary. 

And the big beauty of that is the weather moves, not a satellite. You see all the clouds moving. You see this every night on television. 
- It's hard to beat an explanation from the master. But that was Vern explaining the two orbits. And the geostationary orbit welcomed a spinning space craft in 1966, and it was an instrument that again, Bob Parent and Vern Suomi put together. And there was a hero in Washington, Homer Newell, who basically allowed the satellite schedule to be interrupted in a way that it would never be interrupted now. Based on Suomi's say-so, he said the instrument was ready, he changed the configuration of the payload on the first geostationary satellite, and let Vern's Spin Scan camera go on board. So you had bureaucrats back then thate were heroes, too. And the spinning space craft basically took 1821 steps and gave you a full picture. 

It was a spinning camera, spinning at 100rpm. And when it saw the earth, it would get a picture of one slice, one 18/21 of the earth. And after 18/21 spins, it had a full picture. At 100rpm, that meant you had a picture every 18.2 minutes. And you would mess around for about eight more minutes, and then you would rewind it, and you start all over. So we had pictures of the earth every half an hour. So now the challenge was to take something like this, where Vern had said, "the weather moves, not the satellite," and to make sure that the weather moves and not the satellite. So you had a lot of pictures that you had to line up. And here Vern with his group, with a lot of half-hour pictures. And he's trying to navigate them so that Florida doesn't move, but the clouds around Florida do. 

And so the good science came, then, when you had a system that could register these images so that the earth didn't move, earth being land, and that the cloud patterns were allowed to move. This took a computer effort here, a lot of engineers and technicians at the University of Wisconsin to put together something called the Man Computer Interactive Data Access System, MCIDAS. And Vern would always say that's not a Scotchman, that's a computer system, my computer system. And it was invented to take these and make loops, so that you could infer atmospheric motions. Here's some of the early pictures of cloud vectors around a hurricane. And this is a person that would be at a computer system, clicking and moving the vectors so that you could get atmospheric motion. And in this case, Florida would not be moving underneath, because he had already registered it. Down in Chicago, you had a good friend of Vern's, Ted Fujita, who was very interested in geostationary satellites, because they gave him an eye towards atmospheric motion. He'd been studying thunderstorms for some time. Vern and Ted collaborated a lot on the best way to squeeze out atmospheric motions from these satellite images. 

Here is one of Ted Fujita's very careful pieces of work, where he's looking at the leading edge of a thunderstorm anvil, and he's noticing that the winds are very different from the front of the anvil towards the middle of the anvil. That hadn't been seen before. He squeezed that out of some of the geostationary satellite data. The very first spin scan camera was visible only. Pretty soon, we had three parts of the visible spectrum. And we were able to put down the first color movies of the earth planet. And those are still the only color movies we have of the earth planet, because the blue channel has been missing ever since. In Jean's talk, she'll show you a little bit more about this, because we still have the archives. They're basically pictures. And if you're very careful and work very hard, you can get a loop out of this. 

At any rate, a lot of good things happened. I don't think this was on Vern's birthday. But in 1968, the Space Science and Engineering Center welcomed, I'm sorry, the new building welcomed the Space Science and Engineering Center. They moved in and the skyline of Madison changed. We didn't have the antennas on the roof right away, but they came shortly thereafter. And that was basically from support from NASA, NOAA and the National Science Foundation. And we have a plaque in our building commemorating that. The geostationary satellites, with the weather moving and the not the satellite, became very popular with weather forecasters. We soon added infrared there also, so we had day and night imagery. We used the geostationary platform to pump back weather data and also weather pictures, weather facsimile. 

There were an awful lot of uses for these geostationary satellites, and still are. We multiplied them to two, so we covered the east coast and the west coast. And the coverage you see from these two satellites now, the east and the west, is pretty much still what we're doing now. The biggest impact of the weather moving and not the satellite was the hurricane tracking. The director of the National Hurricane Center, Neil Frank, said that the pictures in motion did more to clear the beaches than anything he could have told them from a five day forecast. And this is one of my favorite pictures, Fifi, that happened to be the name of my cat. And she had her honorable day, then, on September 1974. The spin scan camera was not only taken to earth orbit but also to explore the planets. Many of the NASA probes had some of Vern's participation. Larry, a scientist still in the planetary program has been looking at these data for some time. 

But it's the same spin scan technology that has allowed us to take these pictures. Internationally, Vern was obviously well known. He had a good colleague, Pierre Morel. They fought about what spectral bands should go on the next satellites. They agreed water vapor should be one of them. And it was one of Vern's regrets that the European's beat us with the water vapor channel in geostationary orbit. All of the sudden, we started to see the mixing of dry and wet air masses, and the way we view the earth has been changed in a weather forecasting way ever since. This was part of a coordination to get the best weather data set that we could get as one people, one planet, can. In 1979, it was called the first GARP experiment. First global GARP experiment, or first GARP, Atmospheric Research Program experiment. 

At any rate, at the time people used to say, Figi the froggy says GARP. And what we had then was a coordination of the geostationary satellites from different countries, Japan, USA and Europe gave us global coverage, so we could see the weather moving and global patterns. And these dots indicate where we derived atmospheric motion vectors. And here's an example of what Pierre Morel was able to do with the media set with the first water vapor channel. These data sets went into global forecast models, and became a baseline data set for all forecast model improvements since then. In 1979, it was a huge effort to coordinate the international community for this experiment. All the data was archived. Over breakfast, Vern was working also. He talked to his son over cereal and said you've got to invent the cassette archive. So Rick invented something that spun at 100rpm on the recorder, the same as the satellite's rpm, and each spin's worth of data went on one spin's worth of tape. 

And we were able to capture all of these spinning geostationary satellites, the data that they put down. So it was all in the family on this. We still have all that data. We've transcribed it to a different medium, but it's still there, it's still very important to have that archived. What took so long with Figi, and so much effort is now something that happens routinely. We have geostationary orbits from many countries, China, Japan, Russia, India, United States, Europe. We all have capabilities of putting satellites in the geostationary orbits, and taking these time sequences so the weather moves and not the satellite. Korea will soon be joining that group. So the global imagery is there from our partners in this. This is all part of the orchestration through the World Meteorological Organization. 

And we're able to produce wind vectors every day now. We have an effortless Figi, ongoing. Pictures of hurricanes are time composted, and they help clear the beaches when they need to be cleared. And we have montages like this to show afterwards, yes, you were right to get off the beach. Sometimes, you can't clear out everything. You probably recognize this, if you watch the weather channel. This is Katrina. And this is a time sequence before it came into New Orleans. That's the case of the weather moving in this three sigma way. This is a loop of a daily sequence from Florida, where the afternoon convection comes up, and you can see it's almost like the atmosphere is bubbling up. 

Very nice sequences. Europe has the capability to showing you the dust storms over Africa. The purple here is a dust storm. The brownish stuff is clouds. And here's the edge of Africa. So the applications of these time sequences is pretty extraordinary. Now back to Rudy Hannel. I told you in the carbon dioxide sense part of the spectrum, you can choose this spectral band that you hardly see into the atmosphere at all, it's very opaque, or you can change it a little bit and you can see to the bottom of the atmosphere, or the surface of the earth. And you can use that to infer temperature profile. If you can get a temperature profile, then you can start saying something about atmospheric stability, if you know something about the moisture. 

So Vern and Bill Smith worked very hard together to get multispectral images onto a geostationary satellite so you can do what we call sounding. You sound the depths of the atmosphere. And with that, you're able then, to say something about the atmospheric stability in time sequence. And here's a day that lives in infamy on 109 North Prospect. April 13, 2006, we had an indication of, early on, atmospheric instability and then the clouds sort of obscure what's happening. But when it's red that usually means stuff is going to happen, that's meteorological terminology! On this date, stuff that happened, you had hail, you had wind damage, and it was all over, guess what? Madison and the region. We had hail. I lost my gutters, 109 North Prospect took this very personally. 

But the hail size was quite large, and for about a year later, anybody who got a cocktail at Wisconsin Space Science was able to have this kind of an ice cocktail. We kept it in our refrigerators. The use of this atmospheric instability information at the forecast offices is really where the rubber hits the road. And we've been working together with them for some time trying to familiarize them with the information content we think is there. Green and yellow here means that we're doing pretty well. Brown means they already knew it. And that's sometimes the case. An experienced weather forecaster knows more about the weather than a satellite can tell him. He knows the local patterns. He can do a good job. 

And the red, folks, we just didn't get through at all. But 75%, or what was the percentage here, 79% were benefiting from this new data. And this is a study that was done back in 1999. We've made some inroads since then. So the geostationary satellite imagery is helping the forecaster do now casting, in other words, the human, but also the numerical weather prediction model. And the regional model is improving. What you have here is, this is what the radius contributes. This is what the geostationary satellites contribute. This is what the polar orbiters satellites contribute. The bigger the bars, the bigger your clout. 

So radio sounds are still the big time Charlie when it comes to temperature. But I think when you start talking about winds, the geostationary satellite says more. When you talk about moisture, the polar orbiters and the geostationary satellites are having more impact on the regional weather forecast models. So the good news is we're getting some impact from these satellites. The bad news is they're kind of expensive still. At any rate, Vern Suomi, the father of satellite meteorology, next year, 50 years since the first experiment, continued from polar to geo. He put together some excellent instruments that have really improved our ability to understand weather, and I think has also improved our ability to impact weather forecasts so that people can make wiser decisions about what their behavior should be in and around significant weather. And at this juncture, I'm going to turn it over to Jean. But I would like to end with what I think is a very eloquent quote from John Wiley. Upon Suomi's death, he said, "Verner Suomi was a giant of modern science. 

His inventions were simple and elegant, and their consequences are ubiquitous. Anyone looking at a satellite image of the earth on the evening weather is looking at the product of a rare mind." I think he said it very well. We're trying to put together a Suomi Science Museum. Jean is going to give you a little bit of the material on that. And I think you'll agree that we have quite a few artifacts and a good story to tell, and we'd like to tell it to folks. I just started Jean's talk in the middle of her talk. There you go. Never trust me. 
- Thank you, Paul. 

I, too, am going to go back into history a little bit as we talk about why a museum, why here, and why now. Paul has already covered much of this territory about the history of satellite meteorology. I would like to add that Dr. Suomi is considered by many to be the most influential meteorologist of the 20th century. And this quote by John Wiley is also a favorite of mine, so we're going to go back there again. He said that, "His inventions were simple and elegant, and the consequences ubiquitous. Anyone looking at a satellite image of the earth on the evening weather is looking at the product of a rare mind." The consequences may have been ubiquitous, but they're not necessarily known. This is one of the university's many, many untold stories. It's often true that the invention becomes separated from the inventor. 

We take for granted the invention, but can't always remember who made it. Dr. Suomi set the stage for momentous changes in how we view the weather and observe the earth. And looking at the audience, I think many of us can remember a time in the late '50s, when we used satellites, before we used satellites to deliver data and imagery. When forecasters on television used a weather board or a white board to show us what the weather would be. Notice the nonspecific boundaries that indicate rain, generally in the northwest and in the Midwest, and storms very generally in the south west. That was what we had before Dr. Suomi. Then he came along and-- Oh, yeah, that is what we want. Producing the images, the pictures obtained from the satellite, was no small task. 

But the beauty of the process was that the images were taken from one spot, which is why this works. According to Dr. Suomi, in order to get a picture you first had to digitize it, then walk it across the street to the computing center. They'd print it out, and we'd then try to analyze them and paste the outputs together. He describes the pictures as hung on the wall, and a group of scientists walking around the room in their stocking feet trying to see them. And I have this image of these, you know, grown men traipsing around the room trying to put together what would be sort of a flip book of satellite pictures. Now this is a movie that I made using the satellite photographs from the ATS III. And I was able to digitize the images, play with the color a little bit, put them into some film editing software and create this movie. And next, I'll show you the original movie that Dr. Suomi and his colleagues made. 

Suomi knew that being able to not only watch the weather as it happened, but developing the ability to forecast it reliably, had great implications for public safety in almost every sector of life from crop management, to aviation, to the economy. So what Dr. Suomi gave us, and this will take just a minute to start up-- Verner Suomi and his colleagues' images from ATS III, November 18, 1967. We picked November 18, because that was really the first day with a full compliment of pictures from the spin scan camera. Color images. This is a globe. This is the vantage point you'll get from the pictures. And it's grainy. Paul showed you the image, and this is grainy too. This is morning to evening, November 18th. 

And you can, again, see cloud motions. This doesn't go on forever. 
(laughter)
 But I do want to show you the next loop. A cyclone over the east coast of the United States and Canada. And here, they were able to zero in on storms forming in various quadrants of the globe. And in a moment, there'll be a close-up. Crude by today's standards, but revolutionary at the time. It was always Dr. Suomi's mission to create a public good. 

Something that would be useful to all people around the world, and that would ultimately save countless lives. These visualization tools that were originally developed for research had very significant utility. To quote Dr. Suomi, "For example, years ago the American Astronomical Society had some meetings here, and they had a picnic planned out on Picnic Point. The weather looked like it does out there now. It looked like a thunderstorm. So they asked us, 'Shall we go out? Can we go out to Picnic Point and have a picnic, or are we going to get rained on?' Well, this was an exceedingly short-term forecast, and we had the pictures. We saw that there was some clear air out there, but we said from the looks of things, you'd better get out of there by 4:30 and guess what? It rained like mad at 5:00 p.m." 

So the key was that the data was available immediately. As we know, 20 or 30-minute delays for pilots entering severe weather, or for local authorities to warn of approaching thunderstorms or tornados are not helpful, because the emergency has come and gone. Suomi said that timeliness is critical for having the data be able to get from the satellite, through the computer and on the line a few milliseconds after it reaches the earth, as it comes in, so that warnings can be issued quickly. What we have today, I'll show you in just a moment a demo of cloud motions on the globe. The years since the 1960s-- You can go ahead. The years since the 1960s have seen dramatic changes, enhancements and improvements in our scientist's ability to visualize and forecast the weather. This globe will be featured in the museum as one way to examine global cloud motions. Something that we've grown accustomed to seeing every day, but recall it wasn't too long ago that this simply wasn't possible. The science of how to do it came out the university research environment, and industry helped make it available to everyone. We can use a sphere like this to show hurricane development, ocean currents and temperatures, cloud motions, land use information, forest fire tracking, air quality mapping, to name just a few. 

This is the view of the world that Dr. Suomi made possible for us. Oh, for this? You want them off? 
- Yeah. 
- Okay, that's better. 
- I'll just add one quick thing here. When I first made a flat image of the globe that combined all the geostationary satellites and all the polar orbiter satellites together, I showed Dr. Suomi that. And the first thing he said to me was, "This has to be in all the grade school level classes immediately." 

And so, this is kind of our new tool to get some of the outreach programs together. And I also found it interesting that this is 20 day's worth of data. I can imagine him just smiling, because I brought all that over on a thumb drive today. And I got it all on here within about probably less than an hour. So it's amazing what things have gone through. I'm sure he's smiling right today. 
- We do even more than that. All of these research strands were made possible because Dr. Suomi provided a solid foundation, applying the concepts of continuous observations to track motions. The museum is a natural home for teaching and learning about remote sensing, earth and atmospheric sciences and planetary sciences. 

Here, we see work that has roots at the UW-Madison. The first color ATS III image in the lower left. Above it, Neptune. And to its right, Jupiter. And to its right, the vegetation index of the earth. In the lower right, an image of Wisconsin taken from the spacecraft's MODIS instrument. Now it's possible to observe the atmosphere of other planets, not just the earth. The museum's mission is in keeping with the mission of the university to create, integrate, transfer and apply knowledge. Like the earliest leaders of the university, we have an obligation as a publicly-funded land grant university to broadly share knowledge, the results and implications of our work, and to teach. A Science Museum at Madison would give us a unique presence. 

Kids and adults alike are interested in extremes in heat and cold, snow fall, tornados, severe thunderstorms and flooding. But there's also strong interest in national and global weather. Our location near the Great Lakes makes an ideal spot for research and teaching about these bodies and environmental concerns about them. The museum will educate about all of these topics. We expect the museum to serve school students, college students, because they're a captive audience, teachers and our scientific colleagues. Our estimates for attendance are very much in line with visitors to other small museums, such as the popular Geology Museum, our neighbors on the block. There isn't a museum here that explains this particular picture, how it's made and what we can learn from it. The image was taken again from the MODIS instrument and developed here. We have unique content to share and a unique niche. There are no museums in the surrounding area that duplicate what we are proposing to do. 

Assessment and accreditation, of course, are steps that will come later. But we have a plan for undertaking them, because we are aware of the importance of each. Getting kids and the public excited about science is key. We've all heard about recent studies, warning of dangerous trends in the lack of knowledge of our students in the areas of math and science. Two reports, and there are many others, capture some of these issues. One, the science and engineering indicators published by the National Science Foundation and the trends in International Mathematics and Science Study published by the U.S. Department of Education. In fourth grade, students in the United States are at the top of the pack. By middle school, or somewhere in the middle and by 12th grade, they've slipped even further. Museums teach about scientific principles, making them relevant to daily life. When developed with national and state science standards as a guide, these institutions can and do play a critical role in augmenting K-12 science education. 

These studies suggest that public support for science is very strong, but that the performance of U.S. students in elementary and secondary schools is cause for concern, especially at a time when we're experiencing a globalization of the world economy and workforce. Likewise, a recent NOAA study suggests that earth systems science education in the U.S. is in need of significant improvement. When we look at standards across the states, we see a mixed bag when it comes to coverage of ocean science, atmosphere, weather and climate sciences, space topics and technology. Education is the key to the future. Early founders and settlers of the state understood that education provided the means to improve quality of life. As school budgets shrink, we have an opportunity to make the museum an extended and living classroom for a broad constituency. The growth of scientific knowledge, and earth and all sciences has been advanced through technology that's used to identify, understand and solve local and global science issues. Our scientists routinely use technology in the study of the earth, telescopes, space probes, weather satellites, Doppler radar. We're in a unique position to augment the classroom and help teach about the history, current status and future of our changing planet. Especially so during this time of lively debate about our changing climate. 

Paul showed you a picture of the spin scan camera earlier. By establishing ourselves as a formal museum, we'll then be in a position to share artifacts and exhibits with other museums. The spin scan camera, Suomi's brain child, is in storage at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., where no one can see it, or appreciate its importance. We've had very preliminary talks with the Smithsonian about bringing this camera back to Madison to become a center piece of the Suomi Museum. If our application is accepted, we'd become a Smithsonian Affiliate and have this piece on an extended loan from the Smithsonian. Visitors of all ages already come to the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences building to explore the atmosphere of earth and other planets. We already sponsor lots of programs that reach kids, high school students, graduate students, grandparents and working professionals. Not just here, but around the globe. The museum will offer a natural base, guidance and standards for the delivery of all of these programs. Our plan for the Suomi Museum has tried to keep the goals of the university in mind because the university has the clearly defined role in engaging the broader community. 

This was also Dr. Suomi's goal, to make science relevant, applicable, useful and to share it. Of utmost importance is inspiring and teaching kids. We need to make them aware of educational and career options available to them, especially in the areas of math and science inquiry. Public education is integral to the University of Wisconsin, continuing the tradition of the Wisconsin Idea, which says that the influence of university education should extend beyond the classroom and the research laboratory. For more than a century, the Wisconsin Idea has guided university outreach efforts throughout Wisconsin and beyond. The Suomi Science Museum will facilitate communication of scientific progress, technological advances and related concepts in lively and engaging ways. Telling this story through a museum offering interactive exhibits and educational programs is the perfect expression of the Wisconsin Idea. This is our building, as it is today, with all the paraphernalia on the roof. We're in the midst of a major campus renovation, witnessing lots of new construction. 

With addition to the existing structure, our building, the Suomi Science Museum will find a home in the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences building. We're working with the University of Wisconsin Foundation, our federal partners and individuals to secure necessary funding so that we can sustain the plan over time and provide the best overall experience for any visitors that we have. Thank you very much. 
(applause)
 And I think if you're ready, Rick, we'll go into just a few demonstrations with the globe. 
- Turn the lights down. I guess Jean had a nice segue into it, because this globe was brought to us by a Wisconsin Idea endowment. I'm just going to give you a couple little snap shots of what we're trying to show the kids here. This is one of the first things that Dr. Suomi talked about, was the energy between the sun and the earth. 

We give them an idea of what it looks like for daylight for one day. Let's see if I can do this right here. Not only do we show them day, but we show them one year. I'm just going to go through these, okay? This happens to be kind of a full mosaic of all the satellites together, showing a visible image of the earth. 
(inaudible)
Polar angeo, yes. This is polar angeo, the thermal channel, so you can see the temperatures, the colder areas are shown by the white clouds or the white areas of clouds and you can see the dark areas. Here's what Dr. Suomi was talking about, the water vapor. 

You can see the whole earth, it's not just a single entity. It's amorphous. You can follow the water from the southern hemisphere all the way to the northern hemisphere and see the weather patterns. This is talking about what we call the geosynchronous or the polar orbiting satellite. What you see here is what we call a afternoon satellite. The satellite actually stays in the same location throughout the day. You can watch the satellite. The difference between the daylight and the dark is what we call the terminator, and it stays the same distance away from the terminator. With this type of globe, the kids can see exactly what's happening. These are the types of things we'd want to put in our museum. 

This is a similar slide to what Paul showed here. It's how polar orbiting scans the earth. I like to show this when the kids are looking at it, Dr. Suomi says it takes two hours to scan the earth. To do a full scan of the earth, it takes almost 12 hours, or a little better than 12 hours. I'm going to let this one go all the way through and you're going to see Europe come around here. Watch the shift in clouds in the 12 hour interval. Give you an example, hurricanes, how far they're going to travel in 12 hours. That's the benefit of the geostationary satellite. The polar orbiters are very important to us, because they view the poles, but we can see the benefit of the geostationary satellite. 

And there's-- Let's see if I got this right. These are the locations of several geostationary satellites around the world. Dr. Suomi was the first one to put one on there. You can see we have several around the world. This will give you an idea how much larger a geographical area that the geostationaries can see. Like you said, you can scan them up to every 15 minutes or half-hour. The benefits of the geostationary satellites, we do get more frequent imagery. But if you look at the top of the globe, most of you can probably see it, there's a hole up there. That's why we need both the polar orbiters and the geostationaries. 

This is kind of the one that the kids love to see. But it gives you an example of all the different types of satellites in the orbit right now. Not only do we have the geostationaries there, the yellow satellites are defense satellites. They also view the weather. The blue ones are the NOAA satellites. And the red ones are NASA satellites. A little white one, if you see once in a while, we put that on for the kids, that's the International Space Station. Okay, this is kind of a culmination of several things that is we do at the center. I'm going to change it here, just so you can see it a little bit better. If I do this right-- This happens to be the whole 2005 hurricane season. 

You're going to see Katrina in here. You're going to see Rita in here. You're going to see the whole thing. One thing we like to show the kids here, if you watch, the colors in here are the sea surface temperatures. If you watch the hurricanes, as they approach the cold water, they dissipate. One of the big benefits to be able to put both things on top of each other. It's jerking around a little bit because it's trying to get it into memory, and things. So let's see what else I've got for you. I wish that wouldn't be so jerky. But any questions on anything? 

If anybody wants to see anything else. I got a couple other things if we want to see things later. 
- I think we're done right now. We're ready to sort of interact with you and take on some of your questions. But one point I would like to make on top of what he said, the combination... 
(inaudible)
I'll say it a third time, the combination of the two orbits is essential. The geostationary orbit does a wonderful job of telling you what's happening in the tropics in the mid-latitudes every half hour, or even more frequently. But when you get to the tips of the earth, the south pole and the north pole, its viewing angle is very poor. In fact, Europe is way up there, and it's not very good for geostationary viewing. 

When you get to the polar orbiters, they visit each pole every 50 minutes. One pole is revisited every 100 minutes. That's how long it takes for an orbit. So your polar orbit gives you the poles and the mid-latitudes. And the combination of the two orbits gives you these beautiful, global composites. So Vern was smart enough to get instruments in both orbits. The first instruments in both orbits. So he's the father of geostationary and polar orbiting meteorological satellites. I added a few adjectives. And with that little spin up, I hope you have some questions, because we mis-spoke at least three or four times. 

I hope you caught it. Yes, ma'am? 
- When is the museum scheduled to open? 
- We're hoping right now to have sort of an opening event that would coincide with October 13, 2009, which would be the 50th anniversary of that first meteorological satellite. The building renovations and all those things will probably not be in place by then, but we will have some space where this is on display and some of the artifacts will be in another room, and you'll probably have some construction noise by then, too. So our target is to have something by next October. And we're coordinating with the university on how fast we can go beyond that. I don't really have an answer, but come by in October next year for sure. Yes, sir? 
- Are those original satellites still orbiting? 

- Quite a few of them are, and still transponding data. I think Explorer 7, in fact, is still up there, the first meteorological satellite. The power went out almost 18 months later. But it's still orbiting. The power for the experiments, but there was plenty of fuel for these orbits to last. I'll give you a guess, and I'm probably not too far off, about half of them are still up there taking up space. Nowadays, you can't launch a satellite unless you have enough fuel leftover to de-orbit it, which means send it so that it's no longer in orbit. But that was not the case in the early satellites. They're there. And eventually the orbit will degrade, and it will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up. 

But many of them are still up there, quite stable in their orbit. 
- Can you see them with a naked eye? 
- The polar orbiters you can, the geostationaries you can't. When something moves through the sky very quickly in the evening, it takes about ten minutes to go from horizon to horizon, that will be a polar orbiter. 
- Back around 1980, I was hiking the Grand Canyon with a friend, and he said, see that flickering going across there, that's a satellite. So I was under the impression that it was flickering because it was tumbling. 
- I wouldn't know about that, but Sputnik for sure, we all went out in our backyards and could watch it. 
- Can you see them around Wisconsin, and a lot of places can you see satellites? 
- Yes, sir, at nighttime of course, during the daytime it's a bit trickier. 
- Jim Lattis was talking about the light pollution, so he said some town in northern Wisconsin, they had a black out. 

A woman, and maybe other people were kind of upset, they called the police, wondering what that white swipe was across the sky. You know, because they're not used to seeing the Milky Way. 
(laughter)
 
- Yeah, I know there's a lot of sensitivity right now to get street lamps that really only focus light directly where they're supposed to focus, and not around the surrounding area. If you go into the country, or better yet, if you come out of a cave and your eyes are adjusted to the dark, and you're in the middle of a dark area, you'll see an incredible amount up in the sky. And anything that's moving, as I say, from horizon to horizon, and that disappears within 10 minutes, it's typically a polar orbiter satellite. There are at least, actively right now, as part of the Global Observing System, there are seven polar orbiter satellites that are providing data for the system. There are many others that are up there now that have been turned off, but are still visible to the eye at night. But there is a lot of stuff up there to watch, if you can get into a dark place. 

Yes, ma'am? 
- How many satellites are up there, both kinds, that are active and providing data? 
- I think it's part of the Global Observing System, meteorological satellites-- I'm sorry, I was asked how many satellites are up there that are providing data right now, roughly. And my answer's going to be real rough. Of the meteorological satellites, part of the Global Observance System, the number is between 50 and 100. If you take all the communication satellites, military satellites, and all that, it's more like a thousand. There's a web site that NASA has where you can see the whole list and they'll show you where it's looking right now. That's actually a fascinating Web site that I would provide to you if I could give it to you by memory, but I can't. But I could write it down for you sometime. But there are a lot of satellites up there. 

The ones we use for weather forecasting, is about 50. Wait a minute, this gentleman had a question. 
- I was wondering if you can say more about carbon dioxide, you dove ahead in the program, which suggests we have ten years to get the carbon dioxide emissions under control, or we're going to reach the tipping point. I don't know if you can comment on that. 
- Well, I can comment on the carbon dioxide observations that the carbon dioxide is assuredly increasing globally. It has seasonal variations. It has regional variations. As far as a tipping point for climate, I don't really know enough to say one way or another. I think there's an old saying that if it matters-- I can't get this right. If you act like it matters and it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. 

If you act like it doesn't matter and it matters, it matters. So that's sort of my attitude towards this. Yes, sir? 
(inaudible)
 Oh, you have to go to Walt Disney school for a while. Rick, do you want to comment on that? 
- Basically what it is, is you take a flat image of the globe, I think you showed us a mosaic of everything. That's how we start all the images. It just goes into the computer. And underneath the globe, it's called a fish eye lens. 

And it allows us to bend the imagery around the whole globe. There's one projector underneath here, just like the projector that puts up these things here. It's nothing fancy. The big thing is the lens that wraps it around the globe. 
- You had a question? 
- Did you know in advance that we were going to get 100 inches or approximately 100 inches of snow in Madison? 
(laughter)
 
- That's a trick question. The question was, did we know in advance that we would get a hundred inches of snow in Madison. 

I think the National Center for Environmental Prediction did say that the Midwest would have a colder and more snowy winter than usual. But usual is somewhere around 40 inches, so I think they said it would be more than usual, but nowhere near the extreme that we had. But good question. I keep telling you the forecasts are better. In the back. 
- What's the difference between geosynchronous and geostationary? 
- Geosynchronous and geostationary. What's the difference? To my way of thinking, it's the same word. Geosynchronous means it's centered on the earth and its orbit at the equator. 

Geostationary means it's stationary in the sky. One equals the other. There's a subtlety that I'm missing right now, but for practical purposes, at least for this talk, they are the same thing. Yes, ma'am? 
- With the thousands of satellites of all kinds in outer space, how careful does one have to be in calibrating where to launch so they don't collide? 
- The question was, with thousands of satellites in space orbiting the earth, how careful do you have to be in where you launch them so that they don't collide? Actually, there's an awful lot of space. Satellites do come close to each other, but the major concern with satellites is when they become fragments, for whatever reason they disintegrate. Then you have, not just one location, but you have a lot of debris. Small pieces of an ex-satellite are much more dangerous than the satellite itself. 

There have been some recent examples where satellites have been destroyed intentionally, without knowing beforehand that they would explode into many thousands of pieces that would spread out over the area where the satellite was orbiting. We have had situations where the NASA satellite that carries MODIS that Jean showed a picture of, it came very close to some of that space debris, and the orbit had to be changed to avoid that. But most of the time, when you launch a satellite you've already paid for the space that you're going to use. For geostationary satellites, the equatorial orbit for geostationary satellites is parsed out now for communication satellites and many others. So they've divided that out very carefully, and you put your satellite into that slot. For the polar orbiting satellites, everybody is launching them, because it's an easier launch. We are coordinating the orbits through the World Meteorological Organization. But there's still plenty of space, except when you blow up a satellite and it creates a lot of debris. On the other matter, by the way, you do have solar events every now and then, where you have particles from the sun that can interfere with satellite functioning. So we do put the satellites into a protective tuck when we have solar events from the sun spot cycle, where a lot of the electromagnetic energy from the sun can interfere with the satellite's operation. 

So there are various things you do have to worry about when you put a satellite into orbit. 
- Your question is exactly what the kids ask. And when I put up this one here they say what happens? Do they crash into each other? Each one of the polar orbiting ones, they have at a different height, and that's why they're not crashing into each other. So that's a very good question, not only from you but from the kids. 
- Yes ma'am? 
- What is the distance difference between all of these satellites and the Hubble space telescope? 
- The geostationary satellite is, as Vern said, seven earth radii away from the center of the earth, or six earth radii away from the surface of the earth. The polar orbiting satellites orbit at about 800 kilometers. 

The space station is in between the two. I can't remember how much. I'm not even sure. I'll stop right there, because I'm not sure how high up the space station is. It's lower than the polar orbiters, isn't it? 
- Yeah. I'm not sure about the height of the Hubble, but I'll just kind of give you an idea here. If you were a geostationary satellite, and this was the earth you'd be about five and a half feet away. To give you an idea. If you were a polar orbiter, you'd be an inch and a half from the globe. 

Okay, gives you a little idea there. 
- In the space station, do you know roughly the height of that? It's pretty low. It's below 800-kilometers. And the Hubble, I'm not sure where that ended up, sorry. That's looking out. You, sir. 
- Do you have these arranged so that the cameras and satellites can back each other up, so that if one burns out it fills up that image that it would create? Do you have redundancy built into these satellites so that you can keep replacing them and keep filling up your screen? 
- We, in the early days obviously, did not have redundancy. 

But we launched every 18 months. Now we launch about every 15 years with a new instrument. So we launched lots of the same in those 15 years. We currently have two geostationary satellites that we're using operationally. We have one that we've loaned to South America, so that they can experience some of the advanced data that we have from ours. We have two in orbit as spares. So we're very rich in geostationary satellites. We did, at one point, run out of geostationary satellites, so we had to borrow one from the Europeans. There again, that was something Vern Suomi negotiated. There is an international agreement with China and Japan that if Japan's satellite has trouble, China will back it up. 

For a while, Japan borrowed one of ours. So there's an international exchange so that we don't have a hole in the geostationary program. On the polar program, we have a joint program with the Europeans right now, where they're taking care of the morning orbit, the 10:00 orbit that Rick showed you. And we are responsible, then, for the afternoon orbit. We're good for about the next 20 years on the polar orbiting satellites. So there is a spare, but the difficulty with that is somebody always asked me, what's your worst fear? My worst fear is that a rocket blows up and you don't get the satellite into orbit, and you don't have the benefit of that data. My next worst fear is that it goes up there and lasts 50 years because you don't get new technology, you don't get the advancement that you have here on the ground. As technology advances, you'd be able to get much better data and make better advances with it. Because we're buying things on 15 to 20-year cycles, we're using 1970s technology right now in orbit. 

We've got to get a little more efficient in using new technology and getting it into space. 
- A lot has been said about how to use this, for example, tell whether it's going to rain at Picnic Point at 4:30. But if somebody was curious about over a period of time or years, since data's been available, what's happened to weather patterns over Picnic Point for the long range format. I ask this question, because I'm curious as to what you're going to try to show at the museum. Is it all related to what we can do to show what's happening now or in the immediate future? 
- The question was, what can we show in terms of patterns from the last decades over Picnic Point, from weather satellites, if we wanted to. Or are we always going to be focused on what are we going to try to say about tomorrow's weather? Both are equally important, and they're related to each other. We have an archive of the satellite data. And with all satellite data, local knowledge and local usage of the data makes it more powerful. 

So when we blow up the Wisconsin portion of the satellite image from polar and geo orbit and show the last 30 years, there are patterns here that the forecasters at Milwaukee Sullivan can tell you about. So the idea is at the museum to show you both the past, not just the history of putting the instruments there, but to show you weather patterns. And, of course, those weather patterns that were anomalous. What I call Three Sigma Events. Weather models are very good at telling you what the average weather will be, because they've been based on statistical prognostication. But to take full advantage of all the data out there, you can't use statistics, you have to use physics. So that you'll know when you have a severe storm, where you have hail. You can't predict the hail. You can just say that's atmospheric instability. You can't predict a hundred inches of snow over a winter season. 

These are the kinds of things that are outside of the norm, and that's where you have to get more physics into the models, both climate and weather. I weaseled out of an answer to your question there, I think. 
- No, no, it's good. 
- In the back. 
- In addition to Dr. Suomi, can you tell us where-- I think the correct name of the gentlemen 100 or 150 years ago in Wisconsin that was a pioneer in meteorology and weather. 
- I'm less familiar with his story, but we certainly would try to bring forward the Wisconsin role in weather observations here, and then globally. The question was whether we would have more than just Suomi in the museum, and the answer is yes. We would definitely have a Wisconsin emphasis. But our sponsors are going to indicate that too. 

NOAA and NASA are both helping us put together the foundations of the museum, so we also want to tell the NOAA and NASA story so that the public is aware of what's happened with weather and satellites. The focus will be more on satellites though, than ground observations, because that is the unique contribution from the Space Science and Engineering Center. Yes, ma'am? 
- Did the satellites have to do with the discovery of El Nino and La Nina weather patterns? 
- I do know the answer to that. The question was how much did satellites have to do with the discovery of La Nina and El Nino. The weather patterns that we are all very familiar with now. Global observations are only possible through satellites. So the mapping of El Nino and La Nina definitely came with satellites, not before. But there were some correlations between scientists on different continents, where they noted different things. 

For instance, outside of Perth, Australia, the rock lobsters would behave differently in some years than in others. As associated with what was called the Lou Ellen current, which is their gulf stream, warmer water, just like we have the Gulf Stream, and send if off to Great Britain. And as that meandered and changed, that would affect the rock lobster. So you had biologists and Marine biologists getting data that they correlated then with other people that in the northern hemisphere noted strange weather patterns. And the correlations were there, but they didn't actually know why these things were connecting, until you had the satellite helping you piece the global picture together. 
(inaudible)

- I had a button there for you. This is actually 25 years of worth of El Nino and La Nina imagery. Around South America, you can see across there, where the blue ones are were the La Nina years. 

And where it's the red, you've got the El Nino years. 
- It's certainly a lot easier to see with the satellite. But was it because of the satellite that we saw it? I don't think so. People had guessed that this was already happening. Yes, ma'am? 
- The fact that there are so many countries involved in having satellites orbiting in outer space must require a lot of trust, cooperation, integration, communication among those countries and scientists of those countries. My question then is, this is a personal guess on your part, does all that wonderful respect, and trust, and cooperation, have any implications for supporting hope or expectation that in the political realm there will be a little bit more cooperation, and judgment, and integration, and honesty? 
- The question is, with all the satellites being launched by so many different countries, and the amount of coordination that we have in the meteorological and environmental sciences, in the satellite community, will some of that translate into the political community, so that the governments can perhaps coordinate on more than just satellite launches? My short answer is I hope so. 

My longer answer is that there are wonderful communities out there of scientists who get together to discuss global analysis of satellite data. The World Meteorological Organization orchestrates a lot of those meetings. NOAA has been an active participant. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and a leader, because they have put their satellite data out there for anybody to get. The NOAA satellites, geostationary and polar orbiting, have been broadcasting their data to anybody who has an antenna, who wants to call in for a brochure on how to read the data. And that's been going on since 1960. Those polar orbiting satellites have been the best ambassadors for the United States to the rest of the globe for those past 50 years. The other countries are following suit. Europe originally wanted to ask for money for the data. If you wanted to use it today. 

But tomorrow, you could get it free. In other words, today's data tomorrow would be free. But they were discouraged from that, because it violated the open data policy that NOAA and the United States have led. Even though there are military implications with weather data, we've been able to stifle that aspect, and share the pictures of the earth in many spectral bands, where you can sense something about the weather, but you can also say something about man's effect on the environment. And so it's a very, very important question that you ask. The coordination is there, and there is a broader message to all governments that this is one planet and one people. And it's a fact, it's not a belief. Yes, sir? 
- There was a U.S. map up there, and I don't quite understand the implications, but Wisconsin was white. Why was that? 

- I think you're referring to the NOAA study. NOAA commissioned a study to look at, they examined state standards across the 50 states. They looked at ocean sciences, atmosphere, weather and climate as a grouping, space technology, and a couple of other areas. On that particular map, I think Wisconsin was one of about eight or nine states that failed in the area of atmosphere, weather and climate as represented in the state standards. Yes? 
- I just want to clarify these are curriculum standards. 
- Curriculum standards, yes. 
- School instructional programs whether or not they include it in the science curriculum. 
- You're telling me that the university here is a leader of meteorological research, however this hasn't filtered out into the educational-- 
- No, it means it's not in the published state standards. 

It doesn't mean it's not in the schools. But it does mean that the state education agency hasn't issued a recommendation for that. 
- The Department of Public Instruction for the state develops standards for the state schools. Then individual districts have groups that work on standards, as well, within their districts. 
- In Wisconsin, unlike some states, the state education agency does not mandate curriculum. They recommend. The decisions are all made at the local school district level. 
- Thank you. 
(inaudible)

- Okay, well I want to thank you for being an excellent audience, excellent questions. And I will invite you to come and visit the Space Science and Engineering Center October in a year. And remember, that will be our 50th birthday party. Thank you very much. 
(applause)