cc
everyone, to Wednesday Nite >> Tomat the Lab.lcome,
I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the
UW Biotechnology Center.
Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and other
sponsors, Wisconsin Public
Association, and the Science Television, Wisconsin Alumni
thanks for coming to Wednesday Alliance here at UW Madison,
We do this every Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
Tonight, it's a special pleasure night, 50 times a year.
Steve Ackerman. to He's the director of theyou
Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite
Studies, otherwise known as CIMSS.
He's also professor of
sciences. Founded in 1980, CIMSS is an
academic research collaboration between UW Madison and the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric
as NOAA. Administration, otherwise known
weather guys, along with Jon You may know him as one of the
regular guests of Larry Meiller on the air at Wisconsin Public
Radio.
Long Island in New York. Steve is originally from
of the Wisconsin Idea. He is one of the great examples
pleasure to get to know him. Over the years it's been a great
conference when we were thinking About eight years ago at a
outreach, he was the final about the future of science
He used a slinky as a demo and speaker.
science outreach to organize it here at the university, the last
thing you can't do is sit there.
No matter what we build, it's Angot to work and it's got toat.
move, and I really appreciate that metaphor.
Another great story that he's going to get to share is the one
tonight about the Suomi satellite, and it's pretty
extraordinary to think that some
hear about tonight go back to the innovation of videotape as
instant replay in the early '60s
on Sunday afternoons. and Pack[LAUGHTER]r games
I'm looking forward to hearing
Please join me in welcoming tSteve to Wednesday Nite at the
Lab.
Steve Ackerman: Thanks, Tom. [APPLAUSE]
You'll hear it with particular Yes, Tom has settled my accent.
[LAUGHTER] words like water.
I consider myself a Wisconsinite I am from Long Island though
I enjoy really good beer, forreally good cheese,ons.
really good brats, cold winters,
[APPLAUSE] and the Green Bay Packers.
So I'm going to talk about the Got to be a Wisconsinite.
in defining the field of weather role that Wisconsin has played
and then what we're doing today satellites,as well.storically
I want to begin by also thanking, and I'll do this at
the end as well, some folks who have contributed some of the
images I'm going to be showing. We're going to do a lot of
stuff, and I'm only going to
because we do a ton of stuff show you the tip of the iceberg
campus. wSo I'm not going to be able to
show it to you all, but hopefully afterward we can talk
about some of the other things
interested in that I haven't that we do or that you might be
What I'm going to do in terms of touched upon.
the beginnings of satellite tmeteorology and the role thatt
the University of Wisconsin has played in the development of
that. I'm also going to talk about
what we're doing today. So it's not just about what
we've done in the past, although
foundation for us to build upon. we've certainly built a great
where we, and really you, are headed into the future witht
regard to satellites that study the weather, where we're going
to be.
collaboration between the University of Wisconsin anda
NOAA. And so we work with NOAA in
defining the capabilities of the
satellites. And we'll talk about what's
coming down the road. And then along the way, we'll
actually learn a little bit about weather satellites, their
orbits and what they look like
So, historically, it all began and how they're used.
geophysical year, or the IGY, which began in 1957 to 1958,
specifically July '57 to the end of December in '58.
And both the US and Russia
to launch and Earth satellite in announced that they were going
look back at Earth and study it. order to support the IGY and
So that was the start of it all. And that began the space race.
that the Russians were sprinters Of course, we all probably know
really quick with the launch of Sputnik in 1957, in particular a
successful launch of Sputnik. And at the bottom there I have a
nice URL where NASA actually
in all the details. So I'm going to kind of give a
broad brush of that.
the attempted launch of the 1957Vanguard rocket, and it with
exploded. It didn't work.
It didn't get very far. And, in fact, it prompted
nicknames like Kaputnik,
[LAUGHTER] Flopnik, and Stayputnik.
have heard those things. So some of you may actually
terms of if you think of it as So not a great beginning in
We're stumbling and they're halfway around the track.
In 1959, there was a successful loss, a loss, sorry,
of the Vanguard satellite,
instrument on it. The Vanguard II had an imager of
clouds. So its purpose was to look at
clouds and to image them. However, because it wobbled a
lot, it really wasn't any good. And so you're going to be
hearing me, as I go through, a
of what UW has done in terms of vobserving Earth from space.ms
This was the first one, we were not the first one, this was the
first one, although they were not successful.
The other thing I want to point out is at the very bottom of
this New York Times article.
where I'm going to get it. Again, Long Islander so that's
was about 20 inches and about You'll not21 pounds.s that it
So that's about maybe this big. Not a very big satellite.
We'll look at the satellite progression in size as we go
through this as well. And notice the price of the New
York Times in the upper right:
So, historically, pretty good. five cents.
Robert Parent, who was an engineer, designed a radiometerh
to measure the Earth's radiation
And that flew, well actually budget.
and you can image, the way that I'm wording this, what happened,
to that satellite.
That also did not make it. Kaputnik, right?
I think there were like seven Vanguard rockets that blew up on
the launchpad or shortly after. But that was okay in some
regards because they got to build another one and made it a
little bit better, a little bit better instrumentation.
Also, notice the time period
'57 didn't work, '59 we got another one up there ready to
go. So the building of these
satellites is really happening
Today that doesn't happen. really, really quickly.
generation weather satellite We're talking about the next
we're all excited about it but being launched in 2015.
we've been working on it since that's three years away and
So things get more complicated 2008.
to get them in orbit. andSo that was June of 1959.nger
October 1959 they built another instrument.
And that's up there, up on the
It was launched on Explorer VII, right-hand side.
measured the Earth's radiation October 13, 1959, and it
launch, and therefore we call it, as I have in italics there,
that it was the first successful
instrument ever to observe the meteorological satellite
And it was designed, again, by Earth.
So we are the beginnings. Vern SIt all began here.rent.
And, in fact, Vern has become known now as the father of
satellite meteorology, and this is the first step that he took
in doing that.
looking at energy budgets. He began his work actually
energy exchanges between objects So energy budgets are looking at
cornfields. So he went from the cornfield,
very small, all the way up to looking at the planets.
This is kind of the global
Something we still look at energy budget.
And, again, if you think about today.
down, it's all about energy gains and energy losses, how
that occurs.
planet scale, we have to look at And even when we do that on the
are the energy losses. are the energy gains and what
whole, those energy gains and losses in terms of exchange with
the environment are all happening at the top of the
atmosphere. It's all happening with space.
And so we have to measure what's
at the top of the atmosphere coming in and what's going out
the end of our environment, our wclosed environment, and then
that's the surrounding areas. And so if we want to look at,
again, the reflected solar
left, I guess you would say, as well as the outgoing long wave
radiation, that could only be done by satellites.
And that's what his experiment
this today. The instrumentation that he came
up with was actually pretty innovative and pretty darn
clever. What it consisted of, in simple
terms, is basically a white ball
And what would happen then is that as energy fell onto the
Earth from the sun and then got reflected back off the planet,
this solar energy or you can
of the black ball, all that thienergy would be absorbed.erms
And then we can see how much
In addition, the Earth, like us, that heats up.
radiation. we're all emitting infrared
going to absorb that. So that's going to absorb all
the energy, and that's going to tell us the total amount of
energy that's leaving the planet, both reflected solar and
emitted infrared radiation. The white ball, any of the solar
visible energy that's going to
off. hit it are going to be reflected
But the infrared will still be So that won't be absorbed.
white material, that white absorbed by that material, that
And so this one tells us, the white one tells us how much
infrared energy is being
out to space. And then the black one tells us
the total.
solar component, and then we get We subtract them, we get the
terrestrial component. the Earth component, the
and it worked very successfully. So pretty straightforward way,
day, which at the time, It of course, was a lot.ns a
They only looked at 400 to 1000 particular data points were
actually collected, and they
And each one of these little were transmitted down to Earth.
observation was made, and then white dots represents where an
ground stations where the data the yellow dots represent the
Once those satellites get launched, they're gone, they're
up there. So we need to transmit the data
back down to ground stations and
They learned a couple of things with this very simplified
instrument, and actually we have, if I can jump back just to
show you, this guy right here,
the satellite right there. this satellite up there, that's
size of it. It's probably about this big.
And if you come to Science
over to the Space Science and EEngineering building, you cano
actually see a mockup of that satellite.
So we actually took the plans and reconstructed it to scale,
and it's about this big and maybe 80 pounds.
Two people can easily pick it up, although you won't be able
to. [LAUGHTER]
So don't touch it because it was expensive to make that.
So what he was able to do, Vern and his colleagues, a lot of his
PhD students, was to start
balance, that budget at the top of the atmosphere and how did it
correlate with weather systems. And, of course, what they found
was, this is the way it works,
that changes the energy budget the weather systems move around,
And that's important because as we try and get energy out of the
tropics and to the polar
systems that do that, and we can regions, it's these weather
and seeing what happens. measure that now from satellites
Fred House was one of his PhD students and we had a 50th
anniversary and he brought this book over with him because this
is how data storage was done in 1960.
You put it all in a book. We've had, actually,
computerized some of this, typed
actually make maps now and it in by hand, so that we can
actually looked at. But that's how we collected data
in 1960.
tapes, the big reel ones that you would see in sci-fi or maybe
in your own labs. And then we went down to
cassette disks, and now we're to
that it's amazing how much data these litwe can store.le things
This thing now would be nothing to analyze by today's standards.
Again, that was the beginning of
measured the energy budget at thethe top of the atmosphere.hat
And then there were subsequent
satellites. miNow we're going on thiser
satellite called TIROS through
Making each time doing a new the '60s and early '70s.
measurement, a more accurate launch, making a better
measurement. measurement, a more precise
this energy budget era of actually making very precise
measurements of the energy
absorbed by the planet as beginning in the 1980s with the
Earth radiation budget program. And this is an image of the
Earth Radiation Budget
Actually, it's not an image, Satellite.
launched from the space shuttle it's aon October 4, 1984. it was
I like to show this because this
I was at Colorado State working on my PhD, I had just finished
it, and Bill Smith, who was the director of CIMSS at the time,
heard I was job hunting, and he flew down to Colorado and said
have I got a job for you. He was involved with the Earth
Radiation Budget Experiment, but
making new types of satellite measurements and he didn't want
to run that program anymore so
And so I did stuff with dust. I looked at Saudi Arabian dust
outbreaks, and that almost got
Almost. And I'll tell you that story
later on. That also now paved the way for
more satellites, that whole GY
showed that we can do it, and began to map clouds with visible
images again, launched on these satellites called TIROS.
And, again, off to your left you
here. This is the satellite before itr
was launched. Again, look at the size.
Now we've gotten a lot bigger.
person pick it up. You probably can't have one
nice about it is it's not in a Also, the other thing I find
Those guys don't have hair nets on or anything like that.
It's all just out there.
These satellites are all built You won't find that anymore.
like they're doing medical in clean rooms, and it looks
And this was one of the first pictures brought back about
Earth.
Not too bad. There you go.
was the beginning. Not what we see today, but it
whole bunch of these satellite And, in fact, if you took a
together and make a global map. So wherever it's white, there's
clouds. I'll outline with my mouse here,
this is North America right here.
Here's South America down here. I'll probably try and do it with
both that and the pointer.
here. SoThere's Africa, of course.n
And when I first came here Vern was still alive and still very,
very active.
this first image, I kind of Alooked at this and scowled.e
And he almost hit me. [LAUGHTER]
Because when they got this, the scientists were thrilled.
They were excited.
had a global picture of cloud cover on any one particular day.
They had never seen this before.
Pacific region, for example. Never seen hurricanes over the
They could see it. And now there it was.
about the satellites themselves because you can see these things
are stitched together, and you
picture right there, and it's stitched to another picture
right below it. So how do we get those things?
So let's begin by talking about the two primary types of weather
satellite orbits that we use. The first one is what we call
the geostationary orbit.
is about 36,000 kilometers away from Earth, and it's located at
the equator.
location, it can spin around as And fast as the Earth turns.that
And so it's rotating around with
fixed in space. tThe nice advantage of that is's
because it looks like it's fixed
North America and North America in space,remains fixed. down on
And as cloud systems move through, they move.
So it's really good for tracking
And if you watch the evening weather systems.
they show you images of satellites, that's usually from
a geostationary point of view.
weather systems. It's good for tracking moving
that if you're over the western Of hemisphere, you don't knowis
what's going on on the other
Also, you don't really know what's going on at the poles
because you can't see them
you don't see them. becauseSo what do we do?urved so
We launch a satellite in a
We call that, generally, polar different orbit.
the Earth spins, it orbits from orbitingpole to pole.ecause as
It just goes around and the Earth spins underneath it like
that. So we call that polar orbiter.
The advantage of that is two
One is that you can get the entire globe twice a day, one
during the daytime and one
The other advantage is that it's during the nighttime.
So it's at 850 kilometers or so. at a lower altitude.
something, if you don't have So as you get closer to
eyes, you can see more detail. glasses on and you have good
polar orbiters, you get better So in these satellites, these
You can see things better. spatial resolution.
a day, it's really not good for Oweather patterns, per se, in ae
given location because you don't
Another advantage, however, is see it a lot.
pole every day. tAnd so that's a good way toh
track weather systems in polar
So thinking of the geostationary regions.
track weather systems, again satellite again and wanting to
meteorology, came up with the idea of let's put a camera on a
geostationary satellite.
happen is if the camera works, And then in that way what will
you'll see is the satellite will unlike that first launch, what
clouds will move. And so one of the many great
quotes of Vern Suomi is:
not the satellite." And so that was the Suomi Spin
Scan Camera, and even today the types of the imaging that we do
from satellites in geostationary
that he developed. are based on this instrument
That was the name of the And it was flown on ATS I.
You'll also see me, a lot of satellite.
geostationary satellites, timwe call them GOES.ut
It stands for Geostationary Orbiting Earth Environmental
Satellites, satellites
I should say. Again, there's another image.
Not so bad, a little fuzzy, but you can imagine if you have a
couple of these images separated
an animation just like you would by an hour, you're going to get
That's a bit about satellites. in a cartoon.
how we use satellites to infer Let's talk a little bit about
scenes that we're looking at. tAnd there's two ways that we
make observations in terms of weather observations.
One is what we call direct
excuse me, for in place. methods, also called in situ,
properties of the air that it's And in contact with. the
So a good example of that is a
A thermometer measures the air thermometer.
with. So that's a direct measurement.t
Indirect measurements are what
case we don't have physical rcontact with the thing we'ret
trying to measure.
being emitted by that object, and through the amount of they
energy that we get and the
infer something about this patterns that we get, we can
And so now I'm going to ask you a question.
I'm going to tell you,
the image on the left, obviously, the one on the left,
The image on the right, I'm going to tell you that it's an
aluminum pan and it's got water in it.
What can you tell me about that water?
[INAUDIBLE] It's boiling, it's steaming,
how fast it's evaporating.
boiling or evaporating How do you know that it's
You can see it. >> You can see it.
You can see the steam that's
I could argue that, well, no, I just threw dry ice into that
water.
as well. That generates a cloud, a fog,
when it spills out? BuIn generally sinks, right.ud
It generally doesn't go up. What's the other thing in here
that tells you that this water
It's on a stove. is probably boiling?
Exactly. >> It's on a stove.
bottom in here. If you look real close, you cane
see that thing right there. That's red because it's red hot
because it's emitting a lot of
And so this is kind of what we energy.
when we're looking at imagery. do with satellite meteorology
what it is and then from that Weentire picture, we deduceut
something.
see it. AndWe might not see that it'sven
raining, but we're able to
convective over-shooting top, it's got to be raining downa
there and there may even be a tornado.
We also make measurements at
So a lot of times when I show you a satellite image, you'll
hear me talk about the
at as well as the region of wavelengtwhere it is. measured
So this is a visible image made by a camera.
It's at the wavelengths that our
So this is what it would look like if you were standing on
this building taking a picture
You can see, of course, all the antennas that are sitting on the
top.
And, again, this type of thing We're a 15-story building.
energy from a satellite, we're when we're measuring solar
the sun and find out how much energy is coming at us from thet
sun, or if we look at the planet, Earth, we're going to
look at energy that's reflected.
We see reflected energy. So that's what our eyes see.
this thing had? Can you tell >> 15. many floors
15 because I told you, right? But you wouldn't be able to tell
by this imagery unless you can
count them, you might be able to really zoom in and actually
What can you tell me about this power plant thing?
Is it running or is it not
Don't know. >> You don't know.
Right.
not running. You can guess that maybe it's
out. You don't see any smoke coming
that might be an indication that If you saw smoke coming out,
But otherwise you don't. it was running.
measuring visible energy, and a lot of times you don't see that
in the evening news because you are watching the evening news
when? >> At 6 o'clock.
At 6 o'clock and the sun's
Or at 10 o'clock and the sun going down.
visible imagery. isn't up and so you can't get
infrared imagery because you can So a lot of times you see
we're always emitting energy. So if we look at this same scene
in an infrared camera,
So where red regions are hot, and the dark blues and the
blacks are cold scenes. So the sky is clearly cold.
Now what can you tell me about
It's on. the tower?
because you can see the hot air coming out the top.
It emits a signal for sure. Notice the antennas at the top
of the dishes which collect satellite imagery.
They don't beam things up, they collect the image that comes
down from the satellites. You can hardly see those because
they're nearly the same temperature as the ground.
Notice this floor right here
That's where people like to say, in our building is hot.
the computers are actually on the floor below.
This is where the administrators are.
[LAUGHTER]
the heating floor. Actually, this is the floor,
and cooling material is. This is where all the heating
But that's our joke. That's why it's so hot.
satellites, we make measurements So you're going to see
different wavelengths. all the time at a variety of
satellites that you'll see on TV, those instruments have five
different wavelengths.
If you watch the weather Usually you see the IR.
vapor imagery. channel, you may see the water
vapor in the upper atmosphere, That allows you to track water
You very rarely see the visible and you very rarely see the two
other ones which are used for cloud height detection, and then
the third one is used for fire
You can pick up where fires are. detection.
little bit about making satellite imagery because I'm
going to show you a bunch of
bit, and I'm probably not going sto go into the detail of how
they were composed so I want to give you a sense of it now.
A lot of times you'll see satellite imagery in black and
white.
you were all in black and white. Those very early ones I showed
wavelength. AndAnd the gray scale usuallyle
represents energy.
you see on the evening news, the And so at infrared imagery that
it's not emitting a lot of white generally means it's cold,
The black generally means that energy.
So it's usually clear sky. it's emitting a lot.
imagery. Clouds are usually white in
enhance things we'll color code A lot of tthem.in order to
So we'll just put color on them.
that are really cold, we may So if we're interested in things
white because we can do that just make them blue instead of
And I'll show you a couple of scenes that might do that.
Another thing we do is we make
wavelength. So, for example, we may make a
measurement at red wavelengths, one at a green wavelength, and
one at a blue wavelength. When we do that, then we can
take a computer monitor or
observation and put it through television and take the red
observation and put it through the red gun, the green
observation and put it through the green gun, and the blue
And what you end up with is a true color image.
It will look like what it looks like when you're up in space
looking down. Of course, we don't have to use
those wavelengths.
three different wavelengths through three different guns,
and we do that to highlight certain features, like a lot of
times we'll use it to pick out
visible wavelengths clouds are snow from clouds because at
can't distinguish it. And I'll show you an example of
that later on.
using red, green, and blue to Whgenerate our composite colort
imagery, we call that a false color imagery because that's not
the way it looks like according to our eye.
So let's do some image
With image interpretation, as I like to say, usually I like to
define things like the
when the observation was made, wavelength that it was made at,
is made. and then where the observation
know those things is because of Andwhat we're trying to do. to
We're trying to take an observation that this scene is
and turn it into some information about the scene so
that that information we can
we're looking at and down the road hopefully do some sort of
action. So we make an observation of a
cloud scene, we can gain some information about it, like what
is the temperature and how high it is, or is it made of liquid
water or is it made of ice. If it's liquid water but its
temperature is below freezing,
us this is dangerous for flying into because if you have liquids
water that's below freezing and a plane goes into that, you're
going to get icing on the aircraft.
And they don't want to do that. And so the action would then be
the pilot doesn't fly there.
do. So given this picture right in
here, who wants to tell me what it is?
Black lab.
Lab. >> A black lamp?
Black lab dog. >> A black?
Okay. >> Anything else?g.
Landscape?
Possibly Madison. >> Possibly Madison.
Why don't you know? What are some of the reasons why
you would not know? [INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, you don't know what the,
three Ws were. I didn't tell you what the
visible wavelengths, so you can So the wavelsee it.s, this is at
This is what you would look like
When, it's taken in the morning. visually.
Now, does that help tell you Where, it's taken in Madison.
[INAUDIBLE] >> Nope, not campus.
[INAUDIBLE] Nope, the reason why you
can't still figure it out yet is because I also haven't told
you the fourth W. The fourth W is "wesolution."
[LAUGHTER]
these pixels are, right? You want to know how big
pixels, megapixel resolution is usually what you think of when
you're going to buy it. So you want to know how big
these things are. These little pixels right in
here are little.
millimeter. TheNow, does that help you?e a
It helps you eliminate a lot of things.
It's no longer a lab. It's no longer Madison.
It's actually that
[LAUGHTER] little square.
So this stuff here is butter. ThaThat there is maple syrup.e.
It's all melting. It's on my breakfast table
because it's morning. My action is, I'm ready to eat
this. So this is the other thing that
I want to remind us of is that a
things, like looking at lparticular clouds, a lot ofto
times we also want to back out
look like, what's the big anpicture, what's the globalne
picture, so we can put things in
kind of lost of where we're at perspective, otherwise we get
So, now let's get back to ansatellites again.ng.
Where are we today? So one thing that Vern did when
we started getting out images from geostationary satellites,
so the clouds were moving, not
track it through animations. the satellites, you could then
this is an example of, and I'm So in this image right in here,
little wind barbs there that may going to point to a couple of
These are where we track the be a little hard to see.
So looking at how things moved, we're able to determine how fast
they moved because we can measure the distance and we knew
the time between the images.
change in time, that's speed. And, initially, this was all
done by hand by this woman right
This is what here job was. in the right-hand corner.
long time to do this. AThis, actually, the idea of a
doing this, as Tom was alluding to earlier, came from Vern
watching football games when
replay. So you would see, I remember it
as a kid so some of you will
Watching a football game, all the sudden the magic of instant
replay came.
by, let's look at it again. And you could go back and watch
the guy running for a touchdown or get hit or whatever.
And you can do that as many times as you want.
And so Vern said we need to do
We need a computer image that can animate things and, however,
we also need to be able to track
So we don't want to just watch it.
on it. it, we want to make measurements
was called McIDAS which stands And that led him to develop what
'60s, it stands for Man computer for, remember this was in the
McIDAS. IBut, of course, it wasn't just
men working, there were women working on this as well.
But McIDAS actually kind of Scottish, sounded kind of cool
I guess.
So, now if you spent a lot of time, you could develop a lot
more winds than this. But we were actually constrained
because what we want to do with our satellites besides look at
imagery is we want to get them
We want to provide information into weather forecast models.
image comes down, we have a certain amount of time in which
to get it to the model, and if
doesn't get in and it doesn't we doget into the forecast.e, it
And that's why there are so few.
This upper right now, each Today is a different picture.
all, there's a heck of a lot color, you can see, first of
You can see the different mocolors.ws.
They come from different
So the yellows and the greens, satellites.
I'm sorry, the greens and the reds are US satellites..
The blue is European satellites,
satellites. and thThese are from thepanese
geostationary.
polar orbiters. We divide winds over the polar
regions.
forecasting models. In fact, most of the satellite
data that actually gets collected is never seen by human
eyes. It all gets processed in
computers and gets fed into numerical weather prediction
models, and it makes weather
How do we know it makes weather predictions better?
Should we do a demo of how it works?
So this is how it makes works.
better. ThiI've got a ball here.ngs
It's a standard racquetball.
Now I don't anymore. I used to play racquetball.
So I switched to curling. It'[LAUGHTER]ng.
Which is actually more tiring than you think.
The sweeping, it really raises
So if you've taken physics, at your heart rate!
you've developed the equations some point intermediate physics,
is going to fall, how fast it's tgoing to fall and the speed at
which it'll hit the ground. And if you've gone a little more
advanced, you've also then
bounce after it leaves the calculated how high it will
That's all just driven by equations and then solving those
equations.
prediction. AWeather prediction is just a
whole bunch of equations. Granted, they're extremely
complicated and really hard to
all we're doing. solve, but, basically, that's
atmosphere, applying all these We're just taking the
forward in time and see what equations, and then moving it
Same thing. So, let's do a forecast since
we're talking about weather.
So what I'm going to do is I'm Let's let you do a forecast.
I'm going to drop it, and what I going to release this ball.
now of course you're not running want you to do is to predict,
forecasts is by seat of the a model, butpants.er way we do
Ah, I think it's going to be
And I want you to predict how high you think it's going to
bounce. And so in order to do that, what
I'm going to do is I'm going to place the ball on the ground and
I'm going to raise it up. And when it gets to a height
where you think that's how high it's going to bounce, I want you
to clap and I want you to clap
Okay? Everybody got it?
What height is the drop from, though?
I'm going to drop it from this height.
Okay? Alright.
About that height because I may be up here.
Ready?
I'm going to go down and here we Here we go.
Hopefully you might be able to see.
Clap loud.
All right, so most of you were probably between about
my knee and my hip. That's probably what it was.
So, again, since we're doing
Now we're going to validate it. weather w>> Oh!validate.
I cheated, didn't I?
What was wrong? >> You didn't drop it.
I didn't drop it. I dropped it but I didn't just
release it and let it go. I changed the initial conditions
is what I did.
really good for in improving And this is what satellites are
weather forecasts we've gotten weather forecasts because in
we need to know what the so good now with our models that
everywhere. And you can only get that with
satellite observations. And so that's what satellite
observations do.
conditions globally. They bring in the initial
What's the temperature globally? What are the winds globally?
Where's it raining globally? Where are the clouds globally?
to make their forecast. AAnd, of course, if it comes int
wrong, you get it wrong because the initial conditions were
wrong.
you bombed the forecast. So we have what you call,
Which most of you did. [LAUGHTER]
criticisms of weather I don'forecasters.ar any
[LAUGHTER]
Alright, close your eyes. I hit "end" instead of "page".
So now I have a lot of these
to see. sAlright, so that's our cloudt
drift winds.
today, this is where we were in Again, looki1961. where we are
We had about two satellites up there.
This is where we are today. We've got a bunch of
geostationary satellites up there, all international but
data is shared through the World
We got polar orbiters going on, Mand we got a bunch of NASA.
research satellites going on. And they all come into our
rooftop.
They're all satellites. AI think I actually have one up.
here called Jason.
There it is up in here. That guy stopped talking to us.
And so we have no control over
So it's just floating around in an orbit, and it's big.
And it's really bad because it's
Yeah? >> Didn't a country recently
launch a satellite? And how does one negotiate for
space for your satellite? >> Yeah, so launches and
negotiations occur through the
Organization and through the World Meteorological
And through those, there's United Nations.
each country runs. probably a space agency that
any of the spy stuff up on Of course, this didn't even have
So spy stuff, I'm sure you do it there.
[LAUGHTER] and that's the way it is.
one up there, we probably shoot it down, and then they
launch another one. This is where we are today with
imagery.
black and white one that I If you think back to that first
looks like now every night on showethe evening news.at it
And this is produced by our data
have to just look over the US. center, and of course, we don't
watch global cloud patterns move You could do this globally and
This is over a two-week time around.
And every day on our website, this gets thrown up there and
people come and get it and put
like that. it on iPhone apps and things
We also generate a lot of Thisforecast products.on.
And so this is one where we take
19 different spectra wavelengths several wavelengths,
infrared, and from that we can that our eyes can't see,
atmosphere. And by stability we determinee
whether or not it's inducive to convective precipitation.
So anywhere where it's red, that's a region where the
atmosphere can just blow up and a thunderstorm can develop,
a severe thunderstorm.
that's where severe weather occurred, either hail, tornado,,
or high winds.
you'll notice that this was done If you look at the bottom,
So we've been doing this a in 2001 is when it was done.
And, actually, what we're doing now is trying to take this big
red area and confine it and make
So we know that's a region it smaller.
the thunderstorm really going to that's favorable but where is
So we have people working on develop.
We also do climate studies, and I should put climate in quotes.
Here's where we've looked at
satellite going back to the mid-1980s, like 1982 or so, and
derived the cloud cover over
Lakes regions, in fact. LAnd what you see in that is an
annual cycle, an up and down
cloudier over the wet lake in the wintertime and not as cloudy
over the summertime.
is trends. And what we're looking for here
that? W'82, '92, 2000, 30-year period
or so.
slight trend in here. AAnd so we like to joke that in
400 years Lake Superior will be cloud free.
[LAUGHTER]
satellites have gotten better Wand the spatial resolution
has gotten better, have actually
oh, darn, I didn't put up the scale on this, as a function
of season for the state of
So this is average 10 years for December, January, February, the
winter. Upper right is spring.
Lower left is July. And then the fall is the lower
right.
Not so cloudy in the summertime. Very cloudy in the winter.
is what the blue is. This is like 40%-50% cloud cover
cloud cover. And the reds are like 80%-90%
in terms of the summertime being And so it was a surprise to me
That's not what I would have so cloud free.
Because these instruments are getting better, we can actually
zoom in and do composites over
So this right here Madison.
That right there is Lake Monona. is Lake Mendota.
scale. And, again, so here's the cloud
40%-50%, and so what we see is Reds are 70% or so, blues are
are generally, on average, that even these little clouds
land region during the clearer than the surrounding
And here's one snapshot that summertime.
of validating it. juThis is the type of stuff wes
couldn't do before because the
they are now, particularly since satellites weren't as good as
Of course, we can go to Hawaii 2000.
This is the cloud cover in too.
This is Hawaii right there. This is its chain right there.
Dark blues means that it's low
Reds means it's high cloud cloud cover.
Wind direction is pretty cover.
northeast down to the northwest. consistent from here, from the
mountains? And so what happens downwind of
So it's cloud free. And in this region right in
here, there's some up-slope that
around the island. goes around when the clouds whip
spot of really high cloud cover. And so you end up with a local
Hawaii, the big island, don't So buy a house down here.to
You want to go some place else. I like Hawaii because I want to
go down there and validate this.
That's I want to do. [LAUGHTER]
Hawaiian Islands, and that's the So that's the lead side of the
which generate cloud. The newest weather satellite, as
Tom has noticed, is a satellite that was named after Suomi.
So NASA and NOAA got together and in order to honor Vern Suomi
and the fact that he's the
named this satellite after him, fatand it's called the Suomiogy
National Polar Orbiting Partnership Satellite, or Suomi
NPP.
so feel free to do that as well. We're calling the Suomi Sat,
general. This is the satellite in
it. AgAnd these are the different of
instruments that are on it. People in Wisconsin, in the
Space Science and Engineering Center and CIMSS, deal a lot of
this imager, veers, and this
This imaging here does radiation imager down in here, Chris.
So that continues what I had budgeting experiments.
and even back into the 1950s. This satellite here is the size
of a school bus.
now. So they've gotten really big
No covering on it, much of it's >> Is it opopen.ke that too?
Yes, right, once it gets
And this is all done in a clean laroom.d.
So it's satellite bus in a clean
So it's really big, big buildings.
Yeah? >> It kind of looks like it's
wrapped in yellow tape. That's not true, right?
Sort of.
but it's not tape. It's wrapped in yellow stuff,
Gold foil. Anybody know what it is?
It's wrapped in gold foil. >> Gold foil.
That keeps reflecting energy out so it keeps it from
heating up. You don't want it to get too hot
when either the sun shines on it
it. or when EarthYeah?ergy shines on
Where's it put together?
There are private industries >> Where's it put together?
I think Ball in Colorado was that do this.
So the different instruments are where it was all assembled.
and then the bus, which we call the bus which carries all the
instruments, I'm pretty sure it was built by Ball.
And they integrate it and test
that's why it takes so long ibecause there's a lot ofd
instruments in there. I want to just show you some
imagery.
color image. So this right in here is a true
green, and blue. So it's three wavelengths, red,
This is what it would look like Sif you were up in space..
Clearly this is the east coast
And you can see Long Island in there too if you look real
close.
And this is the complement [LAUGHTER]
And if you look real close, you ocan see the Gulf Stream coming
right up in there.
really like this because you can And so you can imagine fishers
are in warm temperature versus identify where those gradients
I'm going to show you, here's another true image.
This is Great Britain right around in here and Ireland and
here is Spain and Portugal and
Here's a scene right in here. So again, in addition to do RGB
color images which make very
products. pAnd so this is looking at theop
cloud height and it's separating.
The yellows and the reds
the purples and the blues are liare ice clouds.ds, and
So they're cold.
region right in here, for Aexample, this is an ice cloud,s
right next to it is a water cloud.
If I go back to the visible, you
white. can't tell because they're both
bringing in new spectral So this is the advantage of
see that. obseOf course, we can do itcan't
globally. This is what it looks like.
This was yesterday, I believe.
Something like that, in 2012. So that's what the picture
looked like globally stitched together.
It looks a little bit better
together that I showed you. And, of course, we can do it for
every product.
where a pixel, we're confident So white regions are regions
Green regions is where we're that that pixel is cloudy.
Red regions are where we think confident that it's clear.
And blue regions are where we think it might be clear.
We don't know because we can't
tells us it's cloudy and some information tells us it's clear.
So we don't know. The good thing is you don't see
a lot of red and blue in there. So that's the good thing about
it. And then of course from that we
can get other cloud properties
We can tell how much water is in like how high the cloud is.
liquid water, and we can tell you how big the particles are in
that cloud. These are all things that we
need for climate modeling as
Another instrument that UW is wecritical out is this Chris.
instrument. This is a global picture of it,
of an image at one wavelength.
over 2,000 wavelengths. So, again, very hard to visually
picture that, so what we try and
So what we'll do is we'll zoom do is turn it into information.
America. in to that region near Central
And we're going to pick out once That's the image on the right.
on a side, and from that, pixelbecause we have 2,000miles
observations, we're going to
of the atmosphere and the dermoisture profile of thefile
atmosphere. And that's what's going to get
fed into a numerical weather
I like to show this because at prediction model.
Society meeting when this data the last American Meteorological
could only get it from UW Madison because we were the only
ones who could generate these pictures.
And as we look at each really detailed issues about
calibration of these
those calibrations work and solve any calibration issues are
here in the Space Science and Engineering building.
Looking at what's coming, a couple of exciting things are
coming down the road. It's called GOES-R program.
If you noticed sometimes on some
said it was GOES 13 or GOES 15 of the imagery at the bottom it
satellites that are being or GOES 8,launched.present the
The US always has two satellites
in part of the US, and the other running, one to look at the east
because we're such a big nation, to look at the western part
Hawaii. So the GOES program, the GOES
satellite, is given a letter
Once it's launched and gets up while it's being developed.
it's working, it's given a and is tested and it looks like
So that's how we know whether or number.
working. not it's under development or
partnership with our NOAA colleagues, particularly those
who are stationed here at Wisconsin in the same building
as the CIMSS scientists, are
observations and the analysis tools for that next generation
weather satellite.
here that you see on the left And,are all made up images.mages
We took weather forecast models,
high resolutions, really high temporal resolutions,
and simulated the satellite observations.
And then simulated current
can compare what does it look observations like.ll so that we
Actually, this is from a
lot like GOES-R. European satellite which looks a
This is what our simulation is. ThiSo then we can develope.
algorithms to test and to develop products like cloud
altitude and cloud top pressure.
Just to give you and idea of its Or cloud water content.
current scene over the capabilities, this is kind of a
We get a little picture like continental US.
We can zoom in and make it that.
Currently, we get that either every 15 or every 30 minutes
depending on what's going on. With the GOES-R we get that
every five minutes, an entire picture of the continental US.
If we want to zoom in on a
hurricane, again that's a zooming in of that hurricane, we
will, with GOES-R, get a look at
severe weather every 30 seconds. a hurricane or a thunderstorm or
We can take a little break and Right now we can't do that.
minutes and then leave because go look for it for a couple of
routinely monitor it. wNow we'll be able to continueo
looking at the US and then look down here every 30 seconds for
where a storm is developing.
really good in terms of distance Why is temporal resolution
I'm going to demonstrate that with an experiment we did with
GOES-10, so you know it's a successful image.
Here's an image of the Texas
things marked like wave, sheer, convection, and over-shooting
top.
over-shooting tops are These convections and
These waves here are atmospheric thunderstorms.
They're going to look like waves, cloud patterns.
And this guy here is sheer so you're going to see clouds going
in different waves. Just look at one region.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you current
capability, which is every 15 minutes, and then I'm going to
show you what it's going to look
So not even every 30 seconds, and you'll see the big
difference between why we want
If you don't like flickering, close your eyes because this is
what it looks like today. That's every 15 minutes.
It's kind of like, eh, annoying.
we get every minute. This is what it looks like when
see what's going on. You can really track things and
sheer. You can really pick up that
bubbling of the thunderstorms and where their location.e
And this is what we're going to get routinely coming in the
future. Other exciting thing is we're
going to get a geostationary
We're not involved with it lightning mapper on this GOES-R.
Our colleagues in NASA are directly a lot.
algorithms. rBut this is going to measuree
lightning from space, and,
ground, which is what we measure therefore, not just cloud to
from cloud to cloud and within a now with ground stations, but
And studies have shown that changes in the frequency of
lightning appear to be
tornado development and correlattouchdowns.ngs like
So we'll be able to monitor that.
You see all of the sudden a change in the lightning
frequency, that might be a spot where you would expect a tornado
to develop. So we've come a long way
from remote sensing.
we view our world. It's definitely changed the way
satellites, pretty much. Everything's done now from
CIMSS celebrated its 25th Aanniversary in 19, I'm sorry,.
what would that be? We started in '80.
2005 is when we celebrated our
So we decided to have just a 25th anniversary.
I thought that would be a good little celebration.
But then people from around the world hear we were having this
little celebration and wanted to
So they called me up and said invite me because if you don't
invite me, I can't get my government to pay.
[LAUGHTER]
the world, many of them former So we had people from all over
celebrate, not just CIMSS, but students, coming here to
this is a quote, "...the Mecca the fact that UW Madison, and
In other words, if you're going to do this, particularly
if you're in Europe, if you're
meteorology, you have got to going to be in satellite
Wisconsin because this is where it all began, and this is wheref
the expertise still exists in many of the instrumentations
we use. So with that, I want to say
thanks to those folks again who really helped, particularly all
the CIMSS and SSEC scientists who worked to make some of these
images. And thank you.
[APPLAUSE]