We set off on our long trip down to Christchurch today to begin the 2022 Winter Flight (Winfly) season at McMurdo Station. The itinerary starts off with a flight from Denver to Houston, then we take the 15-hr long flight from Houston to Auckland, and finally we fly from Auckland to Christchurch. The hardest part… Read More
After we arrived home from the CEDAR conference, we had a one-day break before logging on for the virtual 30th International Laser Radar Conference (ILRC30). Ian Geraghty, Arunima Prakash, and Yingfei Chen presented their work in an oral session to a large crowd of “topis” (the virtual users on this platform), drawing intriguing and helpful… Read More
Everyone’s talks and poster presentations went very well! We all spoke on Friday right before the end of the conference in Dr. Chu’s session, and everyone got especially good comments and questions from the attending researchers. We also got to visit with good friends and researchers from other institutions, which is one of the best… Read More
This summer has been full of training and preparation for this fall’s McMurdo deployment, but we are taking a few weeks in June to share our research results with the community at a series of back-to-back conferences! This years annual Coupling, Energetics, and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) Workshop is held in Austin, TX in… Read More
Moving a storage container is a tricky process, and it’s even trickier when it’s 4 containers holding a lidar transmitter and 3 massive telescopes! One of our lidar systems has been housed on NOAA’s Table Mountain site for years, but we were finally able to move it to a more accessible location on campus, meaning… Read More
Earlier this year, Ian and I were selected to receive a Travel Fellowship from the WAVE group, a NASA DRIVE Science Center based out of LASP which funded our travel to Frankfurt, Germany for the 2022 SPARC Gravity Wave Symposium. This is an international group of researchers studying gravity waves in every way from modeling… Read More
On 29th December, a day after his birthday Yingfei and Dr. Chu were having a regular meeting session discussing his research on Sodium data retrieval when they discovered the Boulder TINa layers – a phenomenon earlier only seen in the Antarctic atmosphere, now observed in Boulder a mid-latitude location for the very first time. Little… Read More
On October 10th, Dr. Chu and I (Jackson) submitted a manuscript of a study, led by me, to AGU’s Earth and Space Science journal. This study is titled “Comparison of Three Methodologies for Removal of Random-Noise-Induced Biases From Second-Order Statistical Parameters of Lidar and Radar Measurements”. This paper studies the application of multiple different bias-correction… Read More
On this day back in 2018, I jumped on a plane to kick off what would ultimately be the most fun and rewarding experience of my life: a 14-month deployment to McMurdo Station to operate and maintain our two lidar systems which we use to study the properties and processes of the upper atmosphere. It’s… Read More
And no, I’m not talking about gravitational waves like those created by the collisions of blackholes and measured by the incredible LIGO instrument (Fun fact: LIGO is basically a gigantic Michelson interferometer which, on a much smaller scale, our group uses to measure the wavelengths of our lasers). I’m referring to atmospheric gravity waves which… Read More
