Program Facilities

Atmospheric Science students at the University of Kansas have a nearly full service weather lab at their disposal. The lab is located on the fourth floor of Lindley in room 405 .

A National Science Foundation grant has allowed for the purchase of a Sun SPARC 20 Workstation and 6 Sun Sparc 5's. Each workstation is capable of running WXP, McIDAS, and GEMPAK meteorological data processing programs, and students have full access to the Internet. The workstations can also access current (the example is not) NEXRAD (NIDS) (thanks to WSI) products from Topeka, Kansas and three floater sites, which change daily according to current weather. The weather lab is also a Cooperative Weather Station site for the National Weather Service, reporting the weather conditions in Lawrence to the NWS computer database twice a day.

The map wall.

The laboratory prints out several products daily, including surface and upper air charts, soundings from Topeka, forecast model charts, and text products from the National Weather Service Forecast Offices in Topeka, Wichita, and Kansas City, MO. The products are hung on our map wall (above). Students from several classes use these products to prepare forecasts on a daily basis. The laboratory also archives these maps for future reference.

Besides the weather map archive, the wind tunnel in the basement of Malott Hall and the tornado chamber located on the sixth floor of Malott Hall are available for research.