While still in Northwest High School in Germantown, Maryland, RU freshman Dan Blake discovered his driving passion – weather and using satellites to track it.

He began serving an internship with NASA while still in high school, and that relationship has blossomed, with NASA tapping into Blake’s enthusiasm and sending him around the United States as part of a crew responsible for coordinating educational webcasts. Blake has visited the Hoover Dam, Death Valley, the Grand Canyon, and active lava flows in Hawaii.

These places were selected due to their unique environmental conditions, but they also represented unique challenges to webcasting, particularly Death Valley. Home to the lowest point in the western hemisphere, the incredibly hot, dry climate is detrimental to both humans and computers.

“I accidentally kicked sand into the laptop at Death Valley,” Blake says, laughing. He’s certain no one was laughing at the time, but the webcast did go on as planned.

Blake chose RU due to the excellent physics curriculum and after learning of professor Rhett Herman’s efforts with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to obtain a direct feed from one of its satellites.

That feed has been obtained, and now Blake is tracking data obtained from infra-red scans and water vapor readings. He is quite excited about the future of the technology at RU.

“Hopefully we’ll be making our own weather channel,” he says. He sees a time in the near future when RU maintains a ground station and actually takes over one of the satellites as NOAA phases out older ones. He’s currently assisting Herman in seeking grants for funding of these plans.

He’ll be back on the road with NASA over the summer. Look for him on a computer terminal near you.

—Jeff Crooke