A small crowd of Hampton University professors and students gathered high above downtown Hampton Monday morning.
The group took turns peering over the edge of HU’s 13-story Harbour Centre building, near the waterfront of the Hampton River.
Watch the video – http://www.dailypress.com/news/education/dp-searching-hampton-roads-sky-20160926-premiumvideo.html
Below, along Queen Street, a team from Lockwood Brothers strapped the base of an antenna to a tall, yellow crane and lifted it up to the deck of the top floor, followed by the antenna dish itself.
After the base and dish were installed, the crane slowly lowered a 400-pound, white protective dome over the top of the antenna. A few clangs later, the antenna was good to go.
Using that data, the possibilities are endless.
“This is really spectacular, because we can collect data that can be used for severe weather prediction tracking and analysis,” Russell said. “So if we want to know where storms are going to go, hurricanes for example, out into the ocean, this system will give us real-time data that we can put into our model and better predict where they’re going to go for this area.”
Similar antennas are up and running at other universities across the country, including the University of Wisconsin. HU, though, is the only mid-Atlantic site and only historically black college or university operating one.
Next week, officials from Wisconsin will visit HU to share what they’ve learned about their antenna. Within another week, Russell said, HU students should be able to use and analyze information they gather.
M. Patrick McCormick, the center’s other co-director, said students will be able to graduate with hands-on skill sets that NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and others desire.
“We’re a graduate program, but we do hire some of the undergraduates, and now with this we’re going to really engage with more undergraduates,” McCormick said. “So they’re going to come out with skill sets that are very important to the government for hiring.”
Russell and McCormick envision using the antenna’s capabilities to build partnerships with the National Weather Service, NASA Langley Research Center — where they both worked for 30 years — and the military.
“This is something no one else has done, which is to develop minorities in the atmospheric sciences, which is not too many. So this is our goal, it’s coming to fruition,” McCormick said.
Hammond can be reached by phone at 757-247-4951.
Via Daily Press