Department ASCENT award supports research in Germany

Student Delián Colón-Burgos recently returned from a visit to the Max-Plank-Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany hosted by scientist Daniel Klocke and working with Professor Michael Bell. 

She attended the ORCESTRA (Organized Convection and EarthCARE Studies over the Tropical Atlantic) workshop, where scientists and students from various sub-campaigns within ORCESTRA shared first results using data collected during the project. Colón-Burgos works on a component of ORCESTRA called PICCOLO (Process Investigation of Clouds and Convective Organization over the atLantic Ocean), which deployed the CSU SEA-POL radar on the R/V Meteor, collecting polarimetric retrievals of tropical precipitation across the Atlantic Ocean last August and September.

While abroad, Colón-Burgos worked on a research project relating CSU SEA-POL radar observations collected during the PICCOLO field campaign to satellite brightness temperatures from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-16). As part of her doctoral research, Colón-Burgos plans to train a machine learning model on the PICCOLO dataset using the gridded volume scans to retrieve echo top height and rain rates from the observed brightness temperatures from satellites across the Atlantic Ocean.

In support of this international experience, CSU’s Department of Atmospheric Science provided an ASCENT award.