HAO News

For over a decade, Joan Burkepile has participated in the STEM conference for middle school girls called “Expanding Your Horizons,” at CU Boulder. These one-day hands-on workshops are led by women professionals and are designed to be fun and exploratory.

Summer, 2017—We hosted twelve summer students at HAO. They worked on a range of projects, from building telescopes to employing numerical models to analyzing observations and simulation data. Meet the students and hear their stories.

If you have visited the High Altitude Observatory (HAO) at NCAR in Boulder, CO, you may recall seeing the Maunder’s original butterfly diagram. The chart resembles three butterflies traveling west. Drawn by Annie S.D. Maunder and E. Walter Maunder, it demonstrated for the first time the movement of sunspot emergence from the poles toward the equator over the sun's 11-year cycle.

After 50 years of operation, the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory received a major facelift this week. A new dome has been installed at the site. The old dome was removed Tuesday morning, January 5th, and the new dome was installed before the end of the same day.

For the first time, a mesoscale-resolving whole atmosphere general circulation model has been developed. This was accomplished using the National Center for Atmospheric Research Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model with ∼0.25° horizontal resolution and 0.1 scale height vertical resolution above the middle stratosphere.

The Mauna Loa Solar Observatory (MLSO) K-coronameter (Mk4), was decommissioned on August 2, 2013, to be replaced by the new COSMO K-coronagraph.

NCAR's High Altitude Observatory (HAO) will be installing a new white light coronagraph at the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory (MLSO) in Hawaii in August of this year (2013).