Instructor point of view

Having DOW8 made substantial positive impact on both educational programs it touched. Access to and control of a mobile radar was a tremendous boon. As an instructor, DOW8 was crucial in conveying concepts related to radar site selection, scan strategy, and data interpretation for a variety of applications. The flexibility of a mobile, rapid-scan X-band radar was essential to the success of our summer programs, including the goal of capturing the rapid evolution of regular convection. Traeger Meyer, the DOW8 technician, was also a pleasure to work with and was very good with the students.

Student point of view

Below is a sampling of student feedback from both SOAP and REU participants.

Tyler Fenske (senior, Texas A&M University, SOAP participant): “The opportunity to use the DOW this past summer was invaluable and taught myself and my peers what advantages the DOW has over stationary radars, how to operate the DOW (simply), and how to interpret its data. It was fascinating to see it in action and to see the power of its mobility, as we were able to target certain locations based on where we expected convection and storms to occur. The high-resolution data also provided us with new insights about the storms we were observing. Overall, our time with the DOW was a very positive experience that taught us a lot about its advantages and capabilities.”

Benjamin Johnson (junior, Cornell University, REU participant): “Learning radar and other weather concepts in class is one thing, but being able to apply them in real life was a truly valuable experience.”

Erin Jones (junior, Millersville University, REU participant): “In addition to learning how to use the DOW, I took part in deciding what features should be scanned, when the scanning should begin and end, and how the DOW can be best utilized to achieve the most worthwhile results for the project. This study has advanced my ability to think critically and make decisions in a scientific field project setting.”

Glenn Liu (senior, CUNY Hunter College, REU participant): "Working with the DOW allowed me to experience firsthand the technology and skills used in meteorological fieldwork. As a student from a university without a meteorology program, learning how to operate the DOW and the concepts behind its data acquisition provides invaluable context; whenever I encounter radar data or read literature that is based on it, I can now better understand the author's methodology and its implications for their results."

Kiana McFadden (senior, Jackson State University, REU participant): “Allowing students to have access to the DOW affords great learning opportunities. Students, like myself, are able to have hands-on training with complex instruments while also learning how to collect and analyze data. Utilizing the DOW allows classroom training to be put to use in a real life scenario. I am thankful for the opportunity to have experience working with the DOW, and I hope more students are able to utilize this great tool.”

Emma Thomas (senior, University of Missouri, REU participant): “My experience with the DOW allowed me to gain experience in performing meteorological related field work by participating in real-live data collection and observation. This opportunity also gave me the chance to learn more about radar and how it works, which could be a useful skill to have for academic coursework or future career endeavors.”

Lessons learned

One factor that limits the educational deployment utility of any of the DOWs we’ve requested is the relative lack of ability to recall, display, and loop recently collected data sets in near-real time during the deployment. In an educational deployment, especially a mini-field campaign, many of the lessons need to be learned during the experience itself. It is in this usage where a user-friendly, recently collected data display and processing native to the DOW would be very beneficial.

In addition, formatting of DOW portable hard drives in a PC or Mac-readable format would be helpful for retrieving data during the deployment and prior to the DOW departing. We couldn’t easily read the disk with sample data from the first IOP that Traeger gave us and had to plug it into a Linux server in our basement to read it. We also didn’t get the whole data dump before Traeger left. Andrew Frambach was accommodating in providing us the data after the fact, but it added extra time for everyone to track down the data and transfer it after the deployment was over.

Finally, we very much appreciate the willingness of CSWR to entertain the possibility of processing the DOW8 scans that we did in unconventional ways. A personal lesson learned would be to talk to the CSWR engineers beforehand to see what is possible in terms of data processing (not that we still wouldn’t have scanned the way we did to make the students think more, but an ideal end goal would also be to have the data in a more useable format).