Robert A. Baxter, Certified Consulting Meteorologist

The key to efficiently conducting field studies is having readily available navigational tools and display systems that can enhance the knowledge of the field environment in real time. This allows the informed conduct of studies and collection of the most useful data. As a compliment to the continuous tracer analyzer developed in the early 1980s, I wrote software to interface a LORAN C navigational system to a small, light-weight computer to display aircraft position on a video display. This system was used on numerous projects to aid in the airborne locating and tracking of plume positions relative to surface landmarks. By today's standards this isn't something special. However, this software was written in 1983 on a Commodore 64 and loaded from a tape drive. The total code, including the road and surface features of the appropriate cities, and icons in the shapes of helicopters, flags and plumes was written in less than 8k bytes of code. Subsequent versions of the program were burned into EPROM for instant loading.

In the fall of 2001, as part of the Las Vegas CO saturation study, I integrated commercially available hardware and wrote custom software for integration of GPS, air quality and video data systems with a mapping display to aid in research of the wintertime CO plume in the Las Vegas Valley. For this system two Garmin handheld GPS receivers were used, one to output data at one second intervals for time averaging by a laptop computer, and one for real-time mapping of the van position using Microsoft Streets and Trips 2002 software. The display of van position was provided on two computers in the front and back of the van by sharing the same serial output from the GPS. Three computers were used, linking them through a local area network.  The operating systems included Windows 95, 98SE and XP-Home. Needless to say, peer to peer networking took some time to configure as well as to make two of the computers work successfully with USB to serial adapters to accommodate the needed serial ports for multiple data acquisition systems for different instruments. Each of the computers had multiple Windows and DOS tasks running and not a single crash was experienced in 11 episodes of sampling. Even the XP machine had no failures running DOS tasks that were accessing serial communications and sharing data through the local area network. A block diagram showing the system configuration can be found on my CO Studies Page .