Many children aspire to reach for the stars with NASA. At Plymouth, students are getting the chance to work with that very organization.
Professor James Koermer has taken advantage of a space grant program funded by NASA to give PSU students a taste of real meteorology work. The grant provides them with a certain amount of money per year for undergraduates, graduate fellowships and summer programs. “One of the purposes of the program is to get people to continue with math/sciences career, with hopes that they will provide the future workforce for NASA,” said Koermer.
The project that Koermer and his students have been working on is less about the stars and outer space and more down to earth. Each summer, Koermer takes one to two students to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. There, they have been using the equipment in order to monitor winds.
Koermer began taking students to the space center in the summer of 2005. The first summer, only one student went, but since then there have been two or more.
The experiments they work on have been ongoing, “The main focus of our research is to provide tools that forecasters can use to predict strong winds with thunderstorms,” said Koermer.
One way to achieve this is to monitor the data that the current tools bring in. There are about 42 weather towers around the space center, each providing weather information. The towers have sensors at different intervals of height that record weather data in five minute increments, which is then analyzed by Koermer and his students. “There is 13 years of data from May to Sept… that’s when most of the storms are going to occur, during those 5 months,” said Koermer.
The students look at the types of thunderstorms that come in and try to predict the warning signs for those with high-speed winds. Most storm indicators are put into play in storms in locations that are not coastal. For instance, the sea breeze plays a part in wind indicators in coastal areas, which is one thing that Koermer and his team have to take into consideration in their research.
Koermer and his students have caught quite a few problems in the data. If one sensor is reporting high speed winds and others around it are reporting much lower speeds, it is likely that that sensor is broken, and this is part of what Koermer and his students look for.
The experience also serves to give practical experience to the potential forecasters. “When you’re training a forecaster, they’ll kind of see, ‘Well, it’s 7:00 in the morning, you probably won’t see any events,'” said Koermer.
Students who participate in this program have gone on to other things as well. Koermer says that students have gone on to grad school or even to work for NASA. The work that the students do with Koermer allows them to get connected with other interns and people from NASA. Certainly, the dream of working for NASA is not out of reach, and this program can help it to come true.