Facilities and Equipment

Students have ready access to excellent equipment and facilities found in the Boyd Science Center.

Facilities

Multi-instrumented rooftop weather observation station
Highly-advanced weather center including a state-of-the-art electronic map wall
Weather technology lab and classroom
Observational equipment such as a portable GPS-radiosonde system, a portable micrometeorological measurement platform, and a fully instrumented Automated Weather Observation System (AWOS).
Broadcast Studio equipped with WSI TruVu Titan system for generating weather graphics similar to local television stations.

Computer Resources

Computer equipment including:

24 Pentium IV 3 GHz workstations with 20″ LCD monitors
An electronic map wall consisting 32 19″ LCD monitors and 2 large LCD displays
Two Dell Poweredge 2950 servers with quad core 3.3 Ghz Xeon Processors, 16 GB of memory and a combined total of nearly 8 Terrabytes of data storage

One of only a handful of schools with this capability, Plymouth State receives weather data 24/7 NOAAPORT satellite receive system. We also receive data from the Unidata Internet Data Distribution (IDD) system as a backup and have an Internet II link.

The program uses the NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory FX-Net package for visualization of meteorological data that provides tools similar to that found in National Weather Service Forecast Offices (one of few schools in the country to have this capability). The program also uses other weather packages found at most universities, such as GR2Analyst, Matlab, IDV, GEMPAK, McIDAS and WXP.

See also

MS in Applied Meteorology

Department of Atmospheric Science & Chemistry