Drs Sepideh Yalda and Richard Clark of Millersville University will serve as principal investigators responsible for the identification, organization and management of educational testbeds made up of undergraduate students, pre-service teachers, and high and middle school teacher-partners, whose efforts will involve testing, implementing, and integrating the proto-technologies developed by partner institutions into user productivity environments that are scalable and extensible to undergraduate education and research, pre-service science teaching, and high school and middle school science curricula. The input from these user groups will provide feedback that developers will use to refine the technologies. Analysis and visualization tools will be made available to end users via the myLEAD portal, a virtual interface that can be adapted to an end users personal profile/needs. More information on LEAD can be found on the projects main web site at https://portal.leadproject.org. The PIs anticipate that at least 50 Millersville students will be directly involved in LEAD over the project duration, and as many as 20,000 students nationwide could benefit from this technology.

Recently, LEAD stepped onto the national stage during a keynote presentation by Bill Gates at Supercomputing 2005. Quoting from Mr. Gates' talk, "There are projects that are already underway that take some of these ideas and put them into practice. One that's fairly exciting is called Project LEAD and this takes data that's being gathered about potential tornadoes with new Doppler radars - that's the actual deployment of the radar - and LEAD is a software environment that takes that data and makes it accessible where you can actually be warned of things, run different processing algorithms, and really apply the software in a far more dynamic way. The complete talk can be seen via Webcast at http://www.microsoft.com/winme/0511/25852/supercomputing_mbr.asx

Wintertime Study of Airborne Particles using the Millersville University Tethered Atmospheric Sounding System in Support of MANE-VU

Millersville University (MU) will conduct a field study of aloft and surface airborne particulates in January 2004. Two tethered blimps will be deployed simultaneously, one to conduct vertical profiles of the atmosphere to an altitude of 1000 meters, and the other to obtain 10-hour time series of variables at constant altitude. Dr. Richard Clark was awarded $50K from the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM) to conduct this air quality study, believed to be the first wintertime project of its kind. The project will involve 20 undergraduate students, the majority from the meteorology program but also a few chemistry majors too, who will provide the necessary on-site research assistance and post-analysis. Aloft measurements will include air temperature, air pressure, relative humidity/specific humidity, wind speed and direction, aerosol particle concentration, integrated PM2.5 dry mass, and total scattering as a proxy indicator of particulate matter (PM) concentration. A full suite of surface based instruments will monitor the same variables, as well as CO, O3, SO2, and NO/NO2/NOx concentrations and total and backscatter coefficients. Concurrent with the field study, students at Millersville University will be archiving meteorological field variables generated using the new WRF modeling system, observational data and imagery, and back trajectories to later assist in the analysis and interpretation of field observations.

Dr. Sepi Yalda are investigating the effects of large-scale global atmosphere-ocean interactions on local and regional variability over the period of 1950-present. This study focuses on the various large-scale cycles that can potentially alter and dominate the local and regional temperature and precipitation patterns. This study has been funded by a grant from the Millersville University Environmental Institute/Lancaster Environmental foundation.

MU Meteorology has entered into a partnership with the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP), the Mercury Deposition Network (MDN), and the PA-Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to monitor the chemical makeup and mercury content in precipitation. Dr Richard Clark and a select group of meteorology and chemistry students have committed to collecting weekly precipitation samples from standardized collection units located about 1.5 miles west of Millersville for a period of at least five years. New students will be brought into the program as others graduate, so that over the lifetime of the project about 30 students will be exposed to the techniques of sampling and chemical analysis of precipitation. Read more.

Millersville Meteorology is participating in the three-year North-East Corridor Oxidant and Particle Study (NEC-OPS). Along with researchers from Harvard and Penn State, Dr. Richard Clark is leading a group of MU researchers who use our Tethered Balloon to gather air samples up to 1000 feet. More Information.

Dr. Alex DeCaria is using data collected from the National Lightning Detection NetworkTM over a seven-year period (1995 - 2001) to construct a preliminary lightning climatology for Lancaster County and Southeastern Pennsylvania. Correlations between lightning strike density and geographic factors are being explored using Geographic Information System technologies.