NCAR Strategic Projects

We are designing and building a next-generation airborne radar that could revolutionize the ability to observe, understand, and ultimately predict high-impact weather events. APAR is being developed with funding from NSF and NOAA and is a generational leap forward from NSF NCAR's former tail Doppler radar. It will allow scientists to sample the atmosphere at higher spatial resolution and to peer more deeply into storms. Once completed, APAR will be deployed on our C-130 aircraft and available to the university community.

This program is encouraging, enabling, and facilitating convergence science at NSF NCAR. Convergence science is a means of solving complex research problems that arise from pressing societal or scientific needs through deep integration across diverse disciplines. A convergence research approach is a critical tool for tackling the grand environmental challenges that face society today. NSF NCAR’s Convergence Science Program seeks to create a culture that deeply understands, values, and supports this work. Staff, visitors and affiliates are encouraged to get involved through our communities of practice. 

With funding from NSF, we are working on the design, as well as the site survey and selection, for a new solar observatory that offers the potential to transform our understanding of magnetic fields in the Sun’s atmosphere and how they drive the formation of solar eruptions and other space weather that can affect technologies on Earth. COSMO consists of instruments, including a large coronagraph, that will allow researchers to study aspects of the solar corona that have never been viewed before and ultimately improve our ability to forecast coronal mass ejections and other potentially damaging solar storms. 

Providing communities with the detailed information they need to become resilient to the impacts of climate change, increasingly severe weather, and other environmental challenges requires an enhanced capability for Earth system prediction and predictability. This includes the ability to seamlessly predict phenomena that impact society across time and space scales, including tornadoes, flooding, and space weather in the near term, and sea level rise, droughts, and severity of solar cycle in the long term. To address the gaps in our current capabilities and effectively marshall our resources to move forward, the Earth system predictability across timescales initiative is working with the broader community to create a roadmap for NSF NCAR.

SIMA is an effort to provide researchers with a framework that will allow them to answer frontier science questions by combining the capabilities of multiple NSF NCAR-supported weather, climate, chemistry, and geospace models. The configurable modeling tool will allow scientists to choose the components they need for a specific project — including resolution, grid meshes, dynamical cores, and physics packages — and then connect the resulting atmospheric model to representations of the ocean, land, and sea ice through the Community Earth System Model (CESM).