Abstract
Our ability to monitor, anticipate, and respond to changing circumstances and events is increasingly important, particularly with regard to our physical surroundings. Nowhere is this capability more vital to society, or the challenges associated with its practical implementation greater, than in the context of the atmosphere, where hazardous local weather, such as thunderstorms, tornadoes, and floods - as well as lofted radiological, chemical and biological agents - can, in a matter of minutes or hours, destroy or contaminate life and property over vast areas. Yet, the portion of the atmosphere that contains the bulk of both natural and man-made hazards - the lower troposphere and particularly the atmospheric boundary layer - is grossly undersampled by today's sensing technologies.
This talk describes a new paradigm for atmospheric sensing -- Distributed Collaborative Adaptive Sensing (DCAS) - that offers the potential to comprehensively map winds in the lower troposphere and significantly improve our ability to observe, understand, predict, and warn against atmospheric hazards. DCAS refers to the use of large numbers of small solid state radars that are spatially distributed to achieve high spatial and temporal resolution throughout the entire troposphere. The radars collaborate with each other via a distributed, hierarchical computing and communications infrastructure, that adapts to changing atmospheric conditions in a manner that meets the competing needs of multiple end-users.
The Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) is a new National Science Foundation chartered Engineering Research Center created between engineers, computer scientists, meteorologists, and sociologists at more than a dozen universities, government labs, and companies. The team seeks to create the underlying knowledge and technology basis for Distributed Collaborative Adaptive Sensing. A centerpiece of the CASA plan is the systems engineering, deployment, testing, and operation of wide-scale radar networks being deployed in tornado alley in Oklahoma, in flood-prone Houston, TX, and across the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, where tropical storms are an all too frequent hazard. This seminar will describe CASA's vision and technology roadmap and address our plans for building these systems and for achieving collaboration among a geographically distributed group of experts from multiple disciplines.
Biography
David McLaughlin is a member of the Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty at UMASS Amherst and Director of the CASA, an NSF Engineering Research Center. He received his PhD from UMASS in 1989, spent the period from 1989 through 1999 at Northeastern University, and joined the UMASS faculty in January of 2000, where he holds the Armstrong Professorship in Engineering. His research interests include radar remote sensing, hurricane chasing, and sensor networks.