Cooperation on GPS Meteorology between the United States and Cuba

AbstractIn May 2014 a team of atmospheric and geodetic scientists from UNAVCO and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) sent and helped set up a global positioning system (GPS) receiver to measure atmospheric water vapor at the Grupo de Optica Atmosferica de Camaguey (GOAC) at the Camaguey Meteorological Center in Camaguey, Cuba. The GPS receiver immediately began to produce observations of precipitable water, which are being shared with the international meteorological community. Obtaining permission from both sides to send a highly sensitive instrument from the United States to Cuba was not easy. This paper describes the series of events that led to this achievement, beginning with a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) workshop in Rome, Italy, in 1994 in which Alan Robock met a young Cuban scientist named Juan Carlos Antuna and accepted him as a graduate student at the University of Maryland, College Park. The GPS meteorology connection began with a March 2007 visit of a deleg...