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Cindy Combs retires leaving legacy of collaboration, foundational satellite work

Author: Theresa Barosh - January 8th, 2025

Typically, for climate studies, a researcher might work with forty years of data to account for variation that happens across multiple years. When Cindy Combs started working at CSU, satellites that collect relevant data had not been up for very long.  Over thirty years later, Combs is retiring from CSU’s Cooperative Institute for Research in… Read more »

RAMMB SLIDER

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SLIDER Satellites

RAMMB SLIDER
GOES-18
Himawari-8
Meteosat-9
Meteosat-10
GEO-KOMPSAT-2A
JPSS
https://www.colostate.edu/
https://www.noaa.gov/

Our Mission

The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) serves as a nexus for multi-disciplinary cooperation between NOAA research scientists and Colorado State University research staff, faculty, and students, aligning NOAA-identified research theme areas with long-standing academic strengths of the University.

Our mission is: to foster additional collaboration with national and international agencies who are developing related capabilities; to affect the fundamental research conducted at the University towards NOAA’s operational needs; and to communicate our research and its practical implications to the scientific community and the public.

To this end, we are dedicated to providing high-quality training to ensure operational user proficiency; conducting outreach programs to K-12 education and the general public to promote environmental literacy; and to quantifying and communicating the significant positive societal impacts of NOAA research on our everyday lives.

Our Technology

With NOAA and CSU support CIRA has operated a Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) Earth Station since 1980. Today our collection capability handles multiple simultaneous GOES transmissions, NOAA polar data, Himawari-8 and European MSG. CIRA also plays an important role in each new GOES satellite as one of the primary test sites for initial transmissions and sensor verification.

CIRA operates a high-technology infrastructure to support research in our major theme areas. The infrastructure contains over 300 workstations/servers, a satellite Earth Station with an online archive, several high-performance modelling clusters, and a high-speed network. With its expertise in data fusion, CIRA is developing systems and tools that will simplify the acquisition and manipulation of satellite and model data for scientific research.