Bill Brown's Home Page

I work at the National Center of Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, USA. I'm a Project Scientist in the Earth Observing Lab (EOL)'s In-Situ Sensing Facility (ISF), where we use a wide variety of instruments to study the atmosphere. (The sketch by the way is by my better half, Miho Shida).

I'm also the leader of the ISS/GAUS group, one of the three groups in ISF. The ISS (Integrated Sounding Systems) are weather research stations consisting of boundary layer wind profiler radars, meteorological towers, sodar-RASS, solar radiation, and other sensors including GAUS. GAUS (GPS Advanced Upper-Air Sounding System) is a balloon-borne radiosonde system (these are research versions of weather balloons).

My research focuses on remote sensing of the boundary layer, using for example, wind profiler radars. These instruments make detailed vertical profiles of wind, precipitation, reflectivity, turbulence, and other quantities in the lowest part of the atmosphere, the boundary layer. One of our wind profilers is MAPR, a Multiple Antenna Profiler Radar. By using multiple antennas, we can make measurements much faster than is possible with traditional radar techniques such as Doppler beam swinging. I am working with Steve Cohn on improving wind analysis techniques for the radar, for example, Full Correlation Analysis (FCA) and zero-lag correlation techniques. This profiler is also capable of RIM (Range IMaging) in which the range resolution is greatly improved using small changes in frequency and frequency domain interferometry (FDI) techniques. This work is being carried out in collaboration with Tian-You Yu of the University of Oklahoma.

Currently the main research projects I'm working on are analysis of data from the T-REX, IHOP, and VTMX projects. Other projects I'm involved with are ISPA, a project to study the effect of pollution on snowfall at the Steamboat Springs ski resort; and NAME, a monsoon project in Mexico. Past projects include work for Prophet, an educational project at the University of Michigan Biological Station; ARM, for example a couple of years ago I went on a four week cruise on the Japanese research vessel the Mirai for the Nauru99 field campaign in the central Pacific ocean. We took the MAPR radar with us, the first time a spaced antenna radar has been operated at sea. (Example of MAPR observations at sea).

My old home page from my postdoc days at McGill University. There you can see extracts of my research work at McGill and access various utilities I developed such as real-time images from the McGill profiler radar and ceilometer, as well as a 20,000+ image archive of radar and weather data in the Montreal area. Prior to McGill I had a postdoc in Japan at Kyoto University at the Radio Atmospheric Science Center and, being a kiwi, did my PhD and Masters in New Zealand at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch at the Dept of Physics and Astronomy, and some undergraduate work at the Physics Dept of Massey University.

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