New contract award from NRL's Remote Sensing Division

CPI has been awarded a new five-year, $15.4 M contract to continue science and programming support for NRL's Remote Sensing Division.  This work currently supports a number of key satellite programs, including WindSat, POAM and NPOESS/OMPS, as well as research in atmospheric and boundary layer aerosol physics.  A combination of on-site (at NRL) and in-house CPI personnel will support these efforts.

New contract award from NRL's Space Science Division

CPI has been awarded a five-year contract to continue science, software, and engineering support directed to space-based and ground-based optical experiments being conducted by NRL's Space Science Division.  A combination of on-site (at NRL) and in-house CPI personnel will support these efforts.

CPI/NASA commercial data buy contract extended

NASA has extended its contract with CPI for production, archival and distribution of POAM III atmospheric data.  CPI has been a data provider for NASA's Scientific Data Buy Program since 1999.  Under this agreement CPI performs algorithm development, operational data production and validation of the POAM III data set and makes it available on a monthly basis through the CPI web page (see "Products" link at the top of this page).  This work is done in collaboration with other POAM science team members at the Naval Research Laboratory and at the University of Colorado, LASP.

MOU with Ball Aerospace

CPI has signed a Memorandum-of-Understanding with Ball Aerospace preceding a multi-year contract to support the Space Environment Sensor Suite (SESS) portion of the NPOESS program.  Key activities under the near-term contract include algorithm development, data simulations, and science and software documentation.

Paper selected as an AGU Journal Highlight

The following paper is being published in the American Geophysical Union's (AGU's) Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) and has been selected as a journal highlight:

Strickland, D. J., J. L. Lean, R. R. Meier, A. B. Christensen, L. J. Paxton, D. Morrison, J. D. Craven, R. L. Walterscheid, D. L. Judge, and D. McMullin, Solar EUV irradiance variability derived from the terrestrial dayglow, Geophys. Res. Lett., 31, L03801, doi:10.1029/2003GL018415, 2004.

In addition to its use in the printed issue of GRL (the highlight appearing as a summary inside the cover), it also goes to the AGU press officer for a bi-weekly set of highlights that he sends to self-selected reporters and interested media types. Furthermore, the cover of the issue will contain an image related to the contents of the paper.

CPI Scientist Studies Forest Fire Smoke in the Stratosphere

Forest fires and their effects on Earth's atmosphere have gotten increasing attention in recent years. CPI scientists, in collaboration with researchers across the globe, have elevated interest in forest fires to new levels. In 1998, CPI senior scientist Mike Fromm discovered that fire blowups in Canada were associated with several independent observations of smoke layers in the stratosphere. In a follow-up discovery, a similarly remarkable blowup in Canada in 2001 allowed Fromm and collaborators to trace the observed stratospheric aerosol layers back to an individual fire and severe thunderstorm-the explosive "smoking gun" that Fromm calls a pyro-cumulonimbus. CPI has been in active collaboration with other institutions, investigating mysterious stratospheric observations of aerosols and gases foreign to that level of the atmosphere. For instance, a historic fire in Boise Idaho in August 1992 was determined to be the source of stratospheric methyl cyanide enhancements observed by satellite.

For more information on this research see THIS PAGE and the following papers and articles by Mike Fromm: