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Michael Paul Sullivan (born August 5, 1970 in Baltimore, Maryland) was the third son of John F. Sullivan, Jr (1929-2004). After serving in the United States Air Force, he went on to become a test pilot for NASA at Cape Canaveral. Sullivan is credited with the ECLIPS Experimental Cloud Lidar Pilot Study, which was initiated to obtain statistics on cloud-base height, extinction, optical depth, cloud brokenness, and surface fluxes.
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Lidar is a method for determining ranges by targeting an object or a surface with a laser and measuring the time for the reflected light to return to the receiver. LIDAR may operate in a fixed direction or it may scan multiple directions, in which case it is known as LIDAR scanning or 3D laser scanning, a special combination of 3-D scanning and laser scanning. LIDAR has terrestrial, airborne, and mobile applications.
A ceilometer is a device that uses a laser or other light source to determine the height of a cloud ceiling or cloud base. Ceilometers can also be used to measure the aerosol concentration within the atmosphere. A ceilometer that uses laser light is a type of atmospheric lidar instrument.
STS-64 was a Space Shuttle Discovery mission that was set to perform multiple experiment packages. STS-64 was launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on 9 September 1994, and landed back on 20 September 1994 at Edwards Air Force Base.
Bathymetry is the study of underwater depth of ocean floors, lake floors, or river floors. In other words, bathymetry is the underwater equivalent to hypsometry or topography. The first recorded evidence of water depth measurements are from Ancient Egypt over 3000 years ago. Bathymetric charts, are typically produced to support safety of surface or sub-surface navigation, and usually show seafloor relief or terrain as contour lines and selected depths (soundings), and typically also provide surface navigational information. Bathymetric maps may also use a Digital Terrain Model and artificial illumination techniques to illustrate the depths being portrayed. The global bathymetry is sometimes combined with topography data to yield a global relief model. Paleobathymetry is the study of past underwater depths.
The Scaled Composites Model 281 Proteus is a tandem-wing high-altitude long-endurance aircraft designed by Burt Rutan to investigate the use of aircraft as high-altitude telecommunications relays. The Proteus is a multi-mission vehicle able to carry various payloads on a ventral pylon. The Proteus has an extremely efficient design and can orbit a point at over 19,800 m for more than 18 hours. It is currently owned by Northrop Grumman.
ICESat was a NASA satellite mission for measuring ice sheet mass balance, cloud and aerosol heights, as well as land topography and vegetation characteristics. It operated as part of NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS). ICESat was launched 13 January 2003 on a Delta II launch vehicle from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California into a near-circular, near-polar orbit with an altitude of approximately 600 km (370 mi). It operated for seven years before being retired in February 2010, after its scientific payload shut down and scientists were unable to restart it.
Aeolus, or, in full, Atmospheric Dynamics Mission-Aeolus (ADM-Aeolus), was an Earth observation satellite operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). It was built by Airbus Defence and Space, launched on 22 August 2018, and re-entered the atmosphere over Antarctica in a controlled manner and burned up on 28 July 2023. ADM-Aeolus was the first satellite with equipment capable of performing global wind-component-profile observation and provided much-needed information to improve weather forecasting. Aeolus was the first satellite capable of observing what the winds are doing on Earth, from the surface of the planet and into the stratosphere 30 km high.
CALIPSO was a joint NASA (USA) and CNES (France) environmental satellite, built in the Cannes Mandelieu Space Center, which was launched atop a Delta II rocket on April 28, 2006. Its name stands for Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations. CALIPSO launched alongside CloudSat.
PARASOL was a French-built Earth observing research satellite. It carried an instrument called POLDER which studied the radiative and microphysical properties of clouds and aerosols.
The cloud top is the highest altitude of the visible portion of the cloud. It is traditionally expressed either in metres above the Earth surface, or as the corresponding pressure level in hectopascal.
Spektr was the fifth module of the Mir Space Station. The module was designed for remote observation of Earth's environment containing atmospheric and surface research equipment. Spektr also had four solar arrays which generated about half of the station's electrical power.
Over the last two centuries many environmental chemical observations have been made from a variety of ground-based, airborne, and orbital platforms and deposited in databases. Many of these databases are publicly available. All of the instruments mentioned in this article give online public access to their data. These observations are critical in developing our understanding of the Earth's atmosphere and issues such as climate change, ozone depletion and air quality. Some of the external links provide repositories of many of these datasets in one place. For example, the Cambridge Atmospheric Chemical Database, is a large database in a uniform ASCII format. Each observation is augmented with the meteorological conditions such as the temperature, potential temperature, geopotential height, and equivalent PV latitude.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the field of Meteorology.
EarthCARE is a planned joint European/Japanese satellite, the sixth of ESA's Earth Explorer Programme. The main goal of the mission is the observation and characterization of clouds and aerosols as well as measuring the reflected solar radiation and the infrared radiation emitted from Earth's surface and atmosphere.
ICESat-2, part of NASA's Earth Observing System, is a satellite mission for measuring ice sheet elevation and sea ice thickness, as well as land topography, vegetation characteristics, and clouds. ICESat-2, a follow-on to the ICESat mission, was launched on 15 September 2018 onboard Delta II as the final flight from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, into a near-circular, near-polar orbit with an altitude of approximately 496 km (308 mi). It was designed to operate for three years and carry enough propellant for seven years. The satellite orbits Earth at a speed of 6.9 kilometers per second (4.3 mi/s).
Natalie Alyn Lind is an American actress. She is known for her television series appearances, such as her recurring roles as Dana Caldwell in The Goldbergs and Silver St. Cloud in Gotham, and for her starring roles as Lauren Strucker in Fox's The Gifted and Danielle Sullivan in the first season of the ABC series Big Sky. She appeared as Norma in the Paramount+ original movie Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023).
Vijay Prasad Dimri is an Indian geophysical scientist, known for his contributions in opening up a new research area in Earth sciences by establishing a parallelism between deconvolution and inversion, the two vital geophysical signal processing tools deployed in minerals and oil and gas exploration. In 2010, the Government of India awarded him with the Padma Shri, India's fourth highest civilian award, for his contributions to the fields of science and technology.
Atmospheric lidar is a class of instruments that uses laser light to study atmospheric properties from the ground up to the top of the atmosphere. Such instruments have been used to study, among other, atmospheric gases, aerosols, clouds, and temperature.
Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI, pronounced ) is a NASA mission to measure how deforestation has contributed to atmospheric CO2 concentrations. A full-waveform LIDAR was attached to the International Space Station to provide the first global, high-resolution observations of forest vertical structure. This will allow scientists to map habitats and biomass, particularly in the tropics, providing detail on the Earth's carbon cycle.
Geological structure measurement by LiDAR technology is a remote sensing method applied in structural geology. It enables monitoring and characterisation of rock bodies. This method's typical use is to acquire high resolution structural and deformational data for identifying geological hazards risk, such as assessing rockfall risks or studying pre-earthquake deformation signs.