A dramatic discovery leads to a dramatically different approach

While scientists have been studying geographical weather variations for many years, very little was actually known about weather over many of the world's oceans until the launch of NASA's TRMM satellite in 1997.

Dr. Edward Zipser has been involved with the TRMM project since its early planning stages in 1987, and served as the team leader for its "ground validation" field campaigns. A well-recognized leader in the field, with numerous awards based on his meteorological and space research efforts, Zipser has spent 38 years studying significant weather events. He is currently at the University of Utah and has made many remarkable discoveries about the differences in geographical weather patterns using data from the TRMM satellite. For example, Dr. Zipser found that the vertical reflectivity profile of weather over landmasses is dramatically different than over the oceans.

"It's very important that the automatic radar be able to tell the difference between a typical land storm and a typical ocean storm." - Dr. Edward Zipser, renowned meteorologist (Read more)

The MultiScan engineers discovered Dr. Zipser's findings as they began to work with the aviation community to enhance some of the features of the original version of MultiScan. They soon realized that his research held the key to taking their automatic radar system to the next level - from weather detection to hazard prediction.

Rockwell Collins' senior management ultimately decided to fund a multimillion-dollar series of test flights, conducted in conjunction with Dr. Zipser and the MultiScan engineering team, to categorize the differences in the reflectivity of geographical weather as seen by an airborne weather radar. This data was used to create new algorithms for what would eventually become MultiScan Hazard Detection Radar.

In this video, Dr. Zipser discusses some of his key research findings, and how these relate to MultiScan Hazard Detection radar technology.