Squall comfort
The College of Engineering is home to the new Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere.
For all the eye-popping graphics they produce, today’s weather-tracking systems cannot reliably provide timely, accurate warning of tornadoes, floods, and other brief but devastating weather systems. Tornadoes alone, by one estimate, cause an average 200 deaths and $15 billion in property damage in this nation each year. Yet as many as half of all tornadoes hit populations that have not been warned of their approach. When warnings are issued, as many as 80 percent of them are false alarms, and those that aren’t offer, on average, only 12 minutes’ advance notice.
That, however, may be changing.
The College of Engineering at UMass Amherst is now home for the new Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere, or CASA. Its goal: to engineer a system that will revolutionize the way atmospheric hazards are predicted, tracked, and responded to.
Funded by $17 million Engineering Research Center (ERC) grant from the National Science Foundation, $5 million from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and additional support from Raytheon, IBM, and other corporate sources, the Center is fostering an exciting synergy among a number of groups of researchers on campus as well as a host of outside partners in academia, government, and the private sector.
CASA’s director is Armstrong Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering David McLaughlin, an authority on the design and construction of radar sensing equipment. He proudly points out that more than 120 competitors vied for the NSF grant, and the UMass-led team is one of four that won out.
“This is a very big deal for faculty and students and staff who love to do research and love to tackle and manage complex projects,” he says. “It’s a very big deal because it has tremendous prestige, and it provides the kind of money needed to do ambitious research. It’s a very big deal because our winning one of these flagship grants tells us and the world that we’re performing at top rank in the marketplace of ideas, which will inspire the best students to apply to study with us, the best faculty and staff to join us, and major industries to work with us. This ERC grant allows us to take on a complex problem that has enormous societal impact and makes a huge difference in the lives of millions of people. It’s an opportunity of the sort many of us in research and engineering spend our entire careers dreaming about.”
The project’s complexity is mind-boggling. Today’s storm-sensing systems are
< large, expensive, widely separated radars that are blocked from viewing most of the lower atmosphere by the Earth's curvature. The fact that they predict weather based on observing what's happening at altitudes of a mile or so fundamentally limits their forecast accuracy.In an effort that will tap campus strengths in electrical and computer engineering, computer science,civil and environmental engineering, mechanical engineering, and CASA will engineer an entirely new approach based on a dense network of low-power radars that will defeat earth-curvature blockage and achieve unprecedented levels of resolution. Its new generation of meteorological and resource-management software will allow the radars to focus on individual tornadoes and actually track them down individual streets.
CASA Engineering Research Center