MIRSL's X-band polarimetric mobile Doppler radar, X-Pol, has been deployed to the Dallas/Ft Worth area to serve as a temporary node in CASA's Dallas/Ft Worth Urban Testbed. It is deployed at the site of a future CASA radar to be installed in June 2014. In the interim, the X-Pol radar will provide needed coverage of the western sector of the network as several major events are planned in the Dallas Ft Worth Area, including the NCAA Final Four, during the Spring 2014 tornado season.

Congratulations go to Dr. Rafael Medina who successfully defended his dissertation entitled "Beam Steering Control System for Low Cost Phased Array Weather Radars:  Design and Calibration Techniques" on December 10, 2013.  We wish him best of luck in his new career, and best wishes to all for a Happy Holiday.

Congratulations to MIRSL student Yang Lei who won Second Prize in the 2013 ECE Departmental PhD Poster Session held on Friday October 18th.  Yang's poster was entitled "Forest Stand Height Inversion using Spaceborne Repeat-pass L-band  INSAR Correlation."  Yang is pursuing his PhD under the supervsion of Prof. Paul Siqueira.  Nice work!

Congratulations to Rob Palumbo who won the Best Student Oral Presentation at the 36th AMS Conference on Radar Meteorology held in Breckenridge, Colorado 16-20 September 2013.  Rob's paper was entitled "Polarimetric Observations of Prescribed Bushfires in South Australia using an X-band Phased Array Radar" and was co-authored by W. Al-Ashwal, D. Gray, S.J. Frasier, D.J. McLaughlin, E.J. Knapp, B. Ferguson, and C.P.

MIRSL graduate Dragana Perkovic-Martin (Ph.D. 2008) was recently photographed during a vist by NASA administrator Charles Bolden to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA to learn about upcoming Earth-observing missions.  Dragana is working on the RapidScat mission which will attach a radar to the International Space Station for monitoring global ocean surface winds. 

MIRSL student Rob Palumbo has recently completed the deployment of a Raytheon/First-RF Phase-Tilt Weather Radar to Australia.  Hosted by the School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at the University of Adelaide, Rob and the phased-array observed numerous targets including weather, aircraft, bushfires, wind farms, ships, and sea clutter.  Results from these observations are being presented in upcoming conferen

Professor Mario Parente and students Neda Rohani and Arun Saranathan presented three papers at the 5th Workshop on Hyperspectral Imaging and Signal Processing - Evolution in Remote Sensing (WHISPERS), June 25-28, 2013 in Gainesville, FL.  They include "Graph-based Identification of Boundary Points for Anomaly Detection" by Rohani and Parente, "Threshold-based Segmentation Method for Hyperspectral Images" by Saranathan and Parente and "A New Semantic Wavelet-Based Spectral Representation," co-autho

Congratulations to Dr. Vijay Venkatesh and Dr. Jorge Trabal, who successfully defended their dissertations this winter and spring.  Vijay will be joining Pacific Northwest National Laboratory supporting the Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurements (ARM) Program climate research facilities, while Jorge will be joining Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems in Sudbury, Massachusetts.  We wish them both the best of luck in their new careers.

MIRSL's Michael Zink is the featured researcher in a video produced by the National Science Foundation (NSF) about the NSF-funded Global Environment for Networking Innovation (GENI) program. GENI is a fast, programmable "virtual laboratory" that enables university researchers to experiment on so-called future internets. GENI is also a key part of a White House Initiative called US Ignite, which aims to realize the potential of fast, open, next-generation networks. In the video, Zink talks about his team's use of GENI for better weather forecasting.