Why We Are Cleaning EM/27Sun Mirrors During GeoCarb’s efforts with the Houston Tracer campaign, the sensitive gold mirrors got dirty. Very dirty. The dust and grime in Houston still covered things even when covered in our custom enclosure. At one point, a stray blade of grass flew in and slapped the mirror, leaving a smattering …
Sewing for NASA Through History There is a long and impressive history of sewing for NASA. This was one of the hidden jobs that women performed in early days of spaceflight. Talented seamstresses assembled the first space suits with exceeding precision. Similarly, early computers relied on read-only memory hand woven by ladies which were essential …
GeoCarb Houston TRACER Campaign As discussed in my previous post, the GeoCarb group deployed EM27/Sun instruments for the Houston TRACER campaign. The US Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program to measure the atmosphere above Houston, TX in summer 2022. The GeoCarb group deployed al summer, including two trips where I went. We …
GeoCarb Participates in Houston TRACER Campaign In the summer of 2022, the GeoCarb Mission collaboration participated in the Houston TRACER campaign. The TRacking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment (TRACER) was a field campaign undertaken by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program to measure the atmosphere above Houston, TX. ARM’s goal was …
Lucas Livingstone’s Research In Fall 2021 and Spring 2022, Lucas Livingstone participated in the OU First Year Research Engagement (FYRE) program. Lucas, a Petroleum Engineering student at OU, performed research with me at the Outdoor Urban Air Quality Testing Lab (OU AQTLab). I have previously discussed the research with Lee Fithian at AQTLab on this …
SICB Paper: Radar Aeroecology with LunAero Since I was an invited speaker for SICB 2022, I published a paper on radar aeroecology with LunAero in conjunction with the seminar. In this paper, my co-authors an I discuss a clever method that we extract the estimated flight ceiling of birds from radar. Since the LunAero open-source …
Tom Spicer Lab Greets OU Researchers Recently, my colleagues at OU and I visited the Tom Spicer lab at the University of Arkansas. Our team at OU is interested in performing some tests in low speed wind tunnels to compare with larger scale experiments conducted at OU-AQTLab. This work is an offshoot of the XGEM …
Theory and Practice of Creating Okular Digital Signatures in Ubuntu Recently, I needed to sign and return some documents, but I realized that there was no simple documentation for how to use the new Okular digital signatures in Ubuntu. Digital signatures have long been available to those using Adobe Acrobat for PDFs, but the ability …
Teaching Meteorology Instrumentation In the Spring 2022 semester my colleague from GeoCarb, Elizabeth Spicer, and I escaped the lab and went teaching meteorology instrumentation. Each year, the OU METR 3613 Meteorological Measurement Systems class hosts a workshop. On that day, the students leave the classroom setting to meet with subject experts. Members of research groups …
Getting my UAS License I am now a pilot as I got my UAS license. I pursued the license as a result of the XGEM project. Getting the UAS license was much easier than I expected. I purchased a copy of the ASA test prep booklet and spent about a week learning the rules. I …