McIDAS

McIDAS, the "Man computer Interactive Data Access System", is a pioneering weather forecasting tool developed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the 1970s and used continually to this day. In its early incarnations, it was widely used to generate graphics for television stations, but today is used primarily by the NOAA and related agencies. Users of the McIDAS system developed a similar version for microcomputers and sold by ColorGraphics Weather Systems that generated much of the computerized weather imagery seen on television in the US in the 1980s.

In 1953 Verner Suomi measured the heat budget of a corn field for his doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago. For the rest of his professional career he worked in the field of remote measuring using radiometers, often working with Robert Parent. They developed a remote sensing radiometer with the intent of flying it into space and measuring the heat budget of the Earth. Their first attempt was fitted to Vanguard TV3, but this exploded on launch. A similar experiment flew on Explorer 7 in 1959. This experiment demonstrated the impact of cloud cover on the heat balance of the Earth.

To further develop the field of satellite-based meteorology, NASA and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants led to the creation of the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. At the SSEC, Suomi and Parent developed the Spin Scan Cloudcover Camera (SSCC) to accurately measure and map cloud cover. The SSCC imaged a single strip of the Earth at a time, feeding out its information directly to a radio for broadcast to the ground. Fixed to the body of a rotating satellite, the SSCC would build up a 2D image as the satellite spun and rotated in its orbit.

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