Enabling interagency connection: Adding new dimensions to clouds for aviation
By Theresa Barosh | Feb. 2025
Building out software displaying three-dimensional clouds across the world requires interagency cooperation and bringing multiple sources of information together into one spot. Researchers said the work is well worth the effort to help airline pilots chart safe courses.
Researchers at Colorado State University and University of Wisconsin-Madison’s NOAA cooperative institutes are working to develop the product supported by the US Office of Naval Research with a five-year contract for up to $10 million. Academic cooperative institutes, like CSU’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere and UW-Madison’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, support NOAA’s mission.
CIRA researcher John Haynes, co-PI on the project, works with a team to develop the near real-time global three-dimension cloud product. The team consists of experts in satellite information, the basis for the product.
Building on Previous Work
Fortunately, the research team does not have to start from scratch. They build off work led by CIRA researcher Yoo-Jeong Noh, together with Curtis Seaman and John Forsythe, that started as an effort to support pilots of small planes in Alaska responsible for supplying people in remote locations and participating in search and rescue missions. The research team works off a recently developed CIRA algorithm used by the NOAA community for aviation weather support with information about locations of clouds. Indeed, the CIRA cloud layers product provides information actively being used to assess flight conditions around the recent Bering Air crash in Alaska.
“The exciting part is we’re taking work that was funded and developed under NOAA grants to make aviation safer and then apply it to sensors owned by all sorts of different agencies,” said Haynes. “We’re able to do something that we were doing on a really local scale and apply it in a global framework.”
The CIRA team developed the cloud vertical cross sections algorithm for their cloud layers product based on a set of NASA research-grade satellite radar and lidar information from CloudSat and Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations, as well as, NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer data from the Aqua Earth Observing Satellites. Haynes said that he worked on the CloudSat mission, which launched in 2006, as a graduate student at Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science and has enjoyed working with the resulting satellite data throughout his whole career. “I like to take the kinds of observations that [sources] like CloudSat make and then apply them to other sensors. The information is there, but you have to tease it out.”
That is exactly what Haynes and his team are doing for the new Office of Naval Research three-dimensional cloud project.
CIRA Director Steven Miller said he is proud of the three-dimensional cloud research for engaging NOAA, NASA and the Department of Defense — housing the Office of Naval Research — on a joint effort. Before joining CIRA, Miller worked at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory as a senior meteorologist. “While the targeted users and goals of these agencies differ, they often require the same basic research that CIRA provides.”
Miller said NOAA Cooperative Institutes provide connective tissue between federal agencies, helping them work together and mutually benefit from applied research and development. “From NASA, to NOAA, to the DoD, and ultimately to society at large via increased knowledge, aviation safety, and national security, OVERCAST is a prime example of how the Cooperative Institutes translate common needs for basic research into far-ranging applications that benefit everyone.”