EE grad student Anthony Mactutis will be travelling to Antarctica for the next month or two. Tony is working with Professor Gonzalo Hernandez (Earth and Space Science) to install precision optical sensors in Antarctica which will be used to observe winds in the upper atmosphere. Tony has been building this instrument over the past year, and will now get to find out just how well it works in the field.
The data from this instrument are useful for decribing the circulation of high altitude air near the poles. These air circulation patterns are quite important for understanding long term global climate change as well as more immediate effects such as the "ozone holes" which form in the high latitude winter hemisphere, and are most pronounced over Antarctica.`