With a $14.3 million gift, Jerry Frautschi will help build a world-class visitor and education center at an iconic UW–Madison landmark. Jeff Miller

The Lakeshore Nature Preserve has long held a special place in the hearts of Madison philanthropist Jerry Frautschi ’56 and his family. Now, with a $14.3 million gift, Frautschi will help build a world-class visitor and education center at this iconic UW–Madison landmark.

“My family has lived in Madison since the 1800s, and we feel a great sense of responsibility to give back to the city and community that we love,” Frautschi says. “I am pleased that I am able to carry on my family’s tradition of philanthropy and community service and that visitors will have a welcoming gathering place with improved access to the trails that line the lakeshore.”

The Lakeshore Nature Preserve Frautschi Center is planned for the area outside the stone wall at the Picnic Point entrance. This location does not disrupt habitat within the preserve and is designed to increase natural habitat and stormwater filtration.

“We are fortunate to have such beautiful natural spaces on campus for recreation, research, and education,” says UW–Madison chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin. “And we are exceptionally fortunate for Jerry and his family’s generosity and their commitment to creating this welcoming, accessible, and sustainable space for our students, employees, and visitors.”

The Frautschi family connection to the preserve began 36 years ago when Jerry and his brother, John, purchased what was known as Second Point along Lake Mendota’s shoreline. The property was in danger of being developed at the time, and the family was committed to preserving natural spaces. The brothers paid $1.5 million for the land and then gifted the property to their father for Christmas in 1988. The Frautschis renamed the land Frautschi Point and donated it to the University of Wisconsin.

Construction on the facility is slated to start in 2025, and the center is scheduled to open in 2026.

Shifting to clean energy sources can provide enormous benefits for public health in the near term while mitigating climate change in the longer term. Danielle Lawry

Eliminating air-pollution emissions from energy-related activities in the United States would prevent more than 50,000 premature deaths each year and provide more than $600 billion in benefits annually from avoided illness and death, according to a new UW study.

The study reports the health benefits of removing dangerous fine particulates released into the air by electricity generation, transportation, industrial activities, and building functions like heating and cooking. These are also major sources of carbon dioxide emissions that cause climate change, since they predominantly rely on burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas.

“Our work provides a sense of the scale of the air-quality health benefits that could accompany deep decarbonization of the U.S. energy system,” says Nick Mailloux PhDx’24, lead author of the study and a graduate student at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. “Shifting to clean energy sources can provide enormous benefit for public health in the near term while mitigating climate change in the longer term.”

UW professor Jonathan Patz, senior author of the study, thinks it could motivate more action on climate change.

“My hope is that our research findings might spur decision makers grappling with the necessary move away from fossil fuels to shift their thinking from burdens to benefits,” he says.

“Within the first year or two, water in the North Atlantic sinks all the way to the bottom of the ocean,” says Maroon.

With the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, fears of nuclear war have increased. And while we’ve had an idea of how nuclear fallout will affect life on land, a new study sheds light on what could happen in the ocean’s darkest depths.

Elizabeth Maroon, a UW assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and affiliate in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, was on the team that published the findings. She and her colleagues used climate models suggesting a nuclear war could lead to oceanic changes that would cause temperatures to drop more drastically than in the last ice age.

“Within the first year or two,” Maroon says, “water in the North Atlantic sinks all the way to the bottom of the ocean, which we think has not happened even in the ice ages. In today’s ocean, only near Antarctica does water sink all the way to the seafloor.”

This change in ocean circulation would only be the beginning, paving the way for a damaged ocean food web and extending sea ice.

Eating less beef helped reduce the carbon footprint of the U.S. diet by more than 35 percent over 15 years. Danielle Lamberson Philipp

Changing dietary patterns in the United States are leading to lower emissions of food-related, climate-warming gases, and half of the reduction can be attributed to eating less beef. The intriguing findings come from a UW study recently published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

Every choice we make as consumers has a climate impact, which is often measured in terms of its “carbon footprint” — that is, the amount of greenhouse gases emitted in the process of producing a good or providing a service.

“The greenhouse gases of our food system are one of the largest portions of our footprint as a nation,” says Clare Bassi MS’21, who led the study.

Globally, food systems contribute about one quarter of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. That includes emissions associated with food production, processing, transportation, cooking, and waste. Bassi focused on what individuals can most easily control: what they choose to eat. She analyzed eating habits reported by more than 39,000 U.S. adults in a national survey from 2003 to 2018 and calculated the average daily greenhouse gas emissions associated with diet. Different foods have very different environmental impacts: animal products and processed foods are often much more carbon-intensive than minimally processed and plant-based foods.

In just 15 years, the carbon footprint of the U.S. diet fell by more than 35 percent. Lower consumption of beef, dairy, chicken, pork, and eggs accounted for more than 75 percent of the observed diet-related carbon dioxide savings during the study period; beef alone was responsible for nearly half of the drop.

“The trend is quite exciting,” Bassi says. “Over the study period, national greenhouse gas savings from dietary changes alone are roughly equivalent to offsetting emissions from every single passenger vehicle in the country for nearly two years.”

She also examined trends based on demographic factors, such as sex, age, household income, race, and ethnicity. Every subgroup she analyzed showed a 30 to 50 percent reduction in diet-related greenhouse gas emissions.

These positive trends are encouraging, she notes, but Americans are still exceeding our fair share of food-related emissions compared to other parts of the world: the average U.S. diet-related carbon footprint in 2018 was still nearly twice as high as global targets for minimizing global warming.

“People’s actions are making a difference,” Bassi says, “but we still have a long way to go.”

The canoe arrives at the State Archive Preservation Facility. Wisconsin Historical Society

Archaeological finds are rarely in want of attention. After centuries spent in the quiet stillness of the depths of the earth, they often end up under glass cases in museum exhibits, starring in television specials and documentaries, or (ahem) gracing magazine stories.

This is how the world at large comes to know these relics: in their best light and at their most flattering angles. A fortunate few get to share in the moment of discovery. In the case of the canoe pictured in our story, it was a fortunate alumna who stumbled — or swam — upon it at the bottom of Lake Mendota.

Perhaps that’s part of the beauty in our story: you get to see the canoe just as she did, before it was dug up, cleaned off, and preserved. This photograph has never before been published, and it captures a moment that otherwise can’t be shared, the moment in which an archaeologist confirmed that what could have easily been mistaken for a log was actually a vessel lost to time. When the photo was taken, the age of the canoe was still anyone’s guess. For me, the image captures the thrill of discovery and the solemnity of being in the presence of something both familiar and mysterious — something with the potential to make history.

Take an extra moment with the photo. Notice the stones nestled in the far end of the canoe (and then learn what they are in our story). This scene can’t be staged or re-created in a studio. It’s not every day that history reveals itself, but when it does, seize the opportunity to get a good look.

Milligan-McClellan is as much influenced by her environment as it is by her. Growing up in the Inupiat community of Kotzebue, Alaska, she was intimately aware of her Indigenous heritage and of the disdain with which she was conditioned to regard it. After spending her adolescence rejecting her Indigeneity in pursuit of whiteness, she found herself on a campus perfectly suited to the latter identity. She also found herself miserable. Science couldn’t explain the painful disconnect between her spirit and her surroundings, but it played a crucial role in resolving it.

Milligan-McClellan — known to students and colleagues as “Dr. Kat” — is a microbiologist and assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut. She was previously an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Alaska–Anchorage and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oregon. And before she was a Duck, she spent her undergraduate and doctoral studies falling in love with microbiology at UW–Madison. It’s a journey that has brought her about as far as one can get from Kotzebue — literally and, at times, figuratively. But it’s also led her back there.

Like any good research endeavor, Dr. Kat’s started with asking the right questions.

The price of parasitology

Milligan-McClellan’s early career plans put her not behind a microscope, but at a front desk. She attended hotel-administration school at Cornell University with the intention of running Kotzebue’s local tourist mainstay. After quickly realizing that hospitality was not her calling, she traded lobbies for laboratories and headed to UW–Madison, encouraged by friends and family who assured her that she was destined to become a medical doctor. At the UW, she realized that there was still room to contribute to a field of scientific discovery that she once considered finite.

“I didn’t know that the things we learn about in our textbooks came from research labs and that people are actively doing research,” she says. “When I started working in a research lab and we were discovering new things, I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’ ”

A series of jobs working in labs ranging from plant pathology to studying malaria in mosquitoes brought Milligan-McClellan to her first scientific infatuation: Staphylococcus aureus, an infection-causing bacterium. Later, in her doctoral studies, she switched to the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Her newfound excitement over microscopic life was less contagious back home, where toxoplasmosis — the infection caused by T. gondii — is an uncommon disease and an even less common term.

“When I was doing all this work, I thought it was very important, and everybody at the university was saying that this is important work. But I would go home, and I would tell my dad and my mom, and they’d [go], ‘Staph-what-now? And toxo-huh?’ ” she says. “I was studying these things that they didn’t know, and it had no impact on their life.”

The disconnect with home wasn’t exclusive to her research. At the same time that Milligan-McClellan was making breakthroughs in the lab, she was struggling to recognize herself. Years of being taught in school and by missionaries that traditional Inupiat lifestyles were backward had conditioned her to reject hallmarks of her heritage. “When I first started out in research, I was very much into assimilating into Western science and Western culture,” she says. “I didn’t wear my traditional clothes. I only spoke fluent and ‘eloquent’ English. I was just thinking, ‘I am white, and I am going to behave white, and I am not going to pay attention to all of these things my ancestors took 10,000 years to learn.’ ”

But what Milligan-McClellan once saw as the price of acceptance in “lower-48 culture” quickly proved too high a cost.

“That’s really hard on your psyche. I was pretty dang depressed,” she says. “By the time I got into grad school, crying in the microscope room was no big deal to me because I just felt so isolated, and I didn’t know why.”

Stickleback Solution

According to Aaron Bird Bear MS’10, Milligan-McClellan’s feelings of isolation are devastatingly common among Indigenous students. Bird Bear, the UW’s director of tribal relations, is a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Diné nations and is enrolled in the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota’s Fort Berthold Reservation.

“The United States only decriminalized Native American language and culture in 1975 [with the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act], but just because the United States decriminalized Native American language and culture didn’t mean public institutions or broader society suddenly embraced it,” he says. “Native students have to kind of reconcile that at least 80 percent of their peers know little to nothing about Native Americans.”

Milligan-McClellan found the people who did. Through involvement with student groups such as Wunk Sheek and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), she surrounded herself with people who encouraged her to embrace elements of the culture that she’d long rejected.

Bird Bear was the American Indian student academic services coordinator in the College of Letters & Science when he first met Milligan-McClellan, then a new graduate student.

“Eagle feathers are the highest award Indigenous people can receive in their own communities, so we would invite students to come pick up an eagle feather to take home and bead it for a few weeks, and we would gift it to our graduates upon graduation,” he says. “Kat came in to pick up an eagle feather and wanted to contribute to recognizing the graduating class of that year.”

He recalls one AISES retreat during which Milligan-McClellan led attendees in Alaska Native winter games, a series of traditional challenges like seal-hops and one-legged kicks. While competitive and amusing, the activities also reflected the skills necessary for surviving in the Arctic north.

“It wasn’t until I started talking with [other Indigenous students] that I started recognizing that I’m ignoring 10,000 years of knowledge,” Milligan-McClellan says. “How does that benefit anybody to ignore that amount of knowledge? To turn my back on a history of strong people who have survived in the world’s harshest conditions for that long — it can only do me a disservice.”

Her newfound campus community was also a reminder of what she missed from Kotzebue. Ever the researcher, she began reaching out to family back in Alaska, asking questions and searching for answers that could strengthen her ties to her ancestral home.

“My aunt Lovie was very gracious and would answer all these questions that I had, and that made me understand that there was somebody in my family who would answer. I wasn’t going to be ostracized for [not knowing more about my heritage],” she says. “She told me, ‘You don’t know this because we were told not to know this. Now you’re learning it, and I think that’s beautiful, and I’m going to welcome you back in.”

But while Milligan-McClellan was in grad school, Aunt Lovie died in a house fire.

“Losing that one person who had so much knowledge … made me realize that it shouldn’t be on one person,” she says. “There should be multiple people who are holding onto that knowledge, and it’s my responsibility to my community to start regaining that.”

Milligan-McClellan began relearning her Inupiat language and incorporating traditional foods back into her diet, but she found that her postdoctoral studies offered a road home as well, and another opportunity to contribute to an existing body of knowledge — this time about her own people. She turned her attention from parasites to beneficial microbes and began studying interactions between host organisms and gut microbiota in wild threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus), a species of fish found across the Northern Hemisphere, from Connecticut to Kotzebue and beyond. Studying a host organism’s gut microbiome offers insight into both how the host’s genetics predispose it to certain immune responses to microbiota in the gut and how the organism responds to microbiota introduced into its external environment. MilliganMcClellan intended to study the variations in these relationships across populations in zebrafish under microbiologist Karen Guillemin at the University of Oregon until she agreed to collaborate with Guillemin’s colleague, who was studying stickleback. Initially, she was put off by the complexity of the organism — too many variables to consider. However, the intricacy of the fish proved to be one of its greatest assets, and it’s part of what makes Dr. Kat’s work unique.

Most researchers work with model organisms — think of inbred lab mice, whose diet and environment are meticulously controlled. This is useful for testing one variable at a time, but it doesn’t reflect the unbridled variety of nature. Stickleback allow for a holistic analysis of a complex organism sourced directly from its natural habitat. Thanks to their ubiquity in bodies of water throughout the country, Milligan-McClellan’s lab has been able to assess how each population’s respective environment, available food supply, and stress levels influence its microbiota.

“We were doing collections on Cheney Lake, which is in Anchorage,” she says, “and because we were physically at that lake every month, we could see how clear the water was at different stages. We could see how thick the ice was. We could see that there were bears and moose that wander, but there’s also a lot of people with dogs, and they don’t always pick up the poop. So how is that species of microbe getting into the water, and how is that changing the fish’s microbiome?” Stickleback also gave her a regular excuse to head back home. Toxoplasmosis may have been a mystery to her family, but fish guts had an immediate relevance. After all, it’s only a short evolutionary jump between stickleback and Homo sapiens. “Billions of years ago, there were microbes,” Milligan-McClellan says. “Then some small things happened, and then there were fish, and then a couple of really insignificant things happened, and then there were humans.”

Blood cells such as B cells, T cells, neutrophils, and macrophages — all of which are crucial to a functioning immune system — are conserved from fish all the way to humans. In Milligan-McClellan’s research, these evolutionary links may indicate that interactions in the gut microbiomes of stickleback are conserved to humans, too. The findings could assist in the research and treatment of diseases such as stomach and gastric cancers, which are common among Alaska Natives.

“There are so many diseases that affect Alaska Natives and Native Americans that are correlated with changes in the microbiome. I thought if I study the impacts of changing the microbiota — and also what changes the microbiota — I might be able to identify something that would be important for people back home,” she says.

Studying stickleback in Alaskan ecosystems also means studying the ecotoxins that permeate what is some of America’s most polluted water: the area around Kotzebue has contaminants such as crude oil, microplastics, and antibiotics. Milligan-McClellan’s lab is identifying microbes that could degrade and reverse the effects of those pollutants in a host’s microbiome.

“These contaminants are in the water that my family uses and that our animals come from and use,” she says, “so these ecotoxicants are potentially harming us, the people of Alaska.”

Now when she returns home with research to share, it’s work that directly impacts her community.

“When I talk to people back home about the research I’m doing, they’re not like, ‘Toxoplasma? Who’s ever heard of that?’ Now, they’re like, ‘Oh, crude oil. Yeah, we’re getting more oil in our waters because of increased boat use or snowmobile use. How do you think that affected the waters?’ ” she says. “The only way we’re going to move past this idea that science only belongs to a specific group of people is if we bring everybody into it.”

LESS LONELY

Milligan-McClellan’s research appreciates a living being for what it is, with all of its nuances and complexities. She appreciates nuance and complexity in people, too — even in herself.

After she arrived at the UW, her loneliness was crippling. By the time she left, Dr. Kat was the first person from her village to receive a doctorate in biological sciences. She’s believed to be the first Indigenous person to receive a doctorate in her department and the 10th Indigenous person to receive a doctorate in a STEM field at the UW. They’re feats that have set her apart in her field, but she takes great comfort in knowing she’s not the “only” anymore. “When I started, I was the only Native STEM person that I knew for a while,” she says. “Now, I’ve got all these people I can talk to about this, and it feels really good to know there are so many of us out there. It’s also awesome because I can tell people, ‘Yeah, you’re Native. This is how you can use your Native voice.’ ”

Milligan-McClellan’s work has also caught the attention of some big names in research. The National Institutes of Health is interested in stickleback for their utility as a model for human diseases and human-microbe interaction. The National Science Foundation has taken an interest in her work as a means of studying the evolution of host-microbe interaction in stickleback, which may offer insight into this evolution in other ecosystems.

“Kat’s really fulfilling all the promises we hope for [regarding] Indigenous scholarship,” Bird Bear says, “being grounded in cultural values and advancing the scientific realm with her unique perspective on how she understands the universe to function through the Inupiat universe that she grew up in.”

While relatively linear when traced on a map from start to finish, the arc of Milligan-McClellan’s journey frequently circles back to Kotzebue. Her research excursions have even come to serve a dual purpose: adding to her data on fish guts and deepening her connection to a place that’s been home to many Inupiat for centuries, and will continue to be for more to come.

“We have been on those lands for over 10,000 years. What does that mean? How does that change the way that I think of the tundra?” she asks. “It changes the way I think of the ecosystem there, which influences the way I think about science, which influences the way I think about people back home. All of it interconnects now. It took me going back as a scientist to see that connection.” •

“I feel more foolhardy than brave at this point,” wrote Harriet Bell Merrill 1890, who endured the Byron in order to collect insects, tiny animals, and plants from South American lakes and rivers. “Wherever I land, the threat of cholera, malaria, and the plague are prevalent.”

Despite her private worries, Merrill pulled up her bootstraps — literally — when the ship eventually came ashore. She wore a heavy pair of men’s Oxford boots that drew stares from both locals and fellow travelers, and for the next year, those boots carried Merrill almost 2,000 miles through remote parts of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. She collected hundreds of plant and animal specimens along the way, many of them previously unknown to science, as well as cultural objects for the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Merrill was almost certainly the first professionally trained limnologist to conduct fieldwork in Brazil — and probably everywhere she traveled.

Matthew Berigan ’83, an independent historian now living in Brazil, stumbled upon Merrill’s name while searching for the papers of another UW–trained limnologist, Stillman Wright PhD’28, who conducted the first large-scale survey of northeastern Brazil. It’s likely Merrill’s notes and connections helped to pave the way for Wright’s work, and Berigan hopes that revitalizing the memory of these two scientists will inspire the next generation in both Wisconsin and South America.

“The legacy of inspired curiosity comes from people like Merrill and Wright dedicated to searching out what makes our world tick,” he says.

***

Merrill’s brother told her that it was “entirely out of the question for a petite little woman to hazard such a rigorous venture.” Wisconsin Historical Society, WHY-10804

Known to friends as “Hattie Bell,” Merrill was born in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, in 1863. She grew up exploring the Wisconsin River with her brothers and collected insects, rocks, and plants to study under her microscope. Her childhood passion inspired Merrill to become a high school science teacher in Milwaukee, and later to complete a bachelor’s degree at the UW and a master’s at the University of Chicago. After publishing a monograph on Daphnia, a genus of water fleas that filter particles out of lake water, Merrill was invited to become an assistant professor in the burgeoning limnology department at the UW. Founding department chair Edward Birge, later UW–Madison president, became a close mentor and was supportive of Merrill’s long-held dream to conduct fieldwork abroad.

Birge’s encouragement was a crucial counterweight to the many friends and family who tried to dissuade Merrill from traveling. One brother called her plans irresponsible and told her, “It is entirely out of the question for a petite little woman to hazard such a rigorous venture on her own.” Another brother begged her to postpone the trip until it was convenient for him to accompany her as a chaperone.

Merrill ignored them both. “In spite of all the deterrents, I am ready to roll to Rio,” she wrote shortly before her departure.

She proved to be a hardy traveler, even in the roughest of conditions. Fellow expats advised her to “steep herself in whiskey” to fend off yellow fever. During her nights in the field, Merrill was harassed by giant praying mantises, surrounded by caimans, and besieged by fire ants. She trekked for miles on horseback — and by Oxford boot — to reach Iguazú Falls, becoming one of the first Western women to ever behold the monumental waterfalls.

In 1907, Merrill returned to Brazil for another expedition through Venezuela, Trinidad, British Guiana, and Curaçao. “I keep hunting for the ‘unseen’ through the rain forests and waterways,” she wrote to Birge. “One cannot help but witness the coexistence of beauty with despair in the ecological struggle of procreation in this environment.”

After her second trip, Merrill left the UW to pursue a doctorate at the University of Illinois, but during her studies, a genetic heart condition worsened rapidly. Merrill died in 1915 at age 52. Her letters and field notes were preserved by relatives and colleagues, and her grandniece, the late Merrillyn Hartridge, eventually compiled and donated them to the Wisconsin Historical Society.

“Harriet was a persistent, independent woman, afraid of no potential dangers in any country,” wrote Hartridge in her biography of Merrill. “She died with her boots on.”

“One of my students invented a a shortbread recipe that called for lavender and black ants,” Dunkel says, “and it was out of this world.” Montana State University/Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez

The petite Florence Dunkel ’64, MS’66, PhD’69 has a fitting nickname — Ladybug. This associate professor in plant sciences and plant pathology at Montana State studies insects. To be more precise, Dunkel, 79, has spent more than 50 years studying ways to get Americans to eat bugs.

Ten years ago, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization invited Dunkel (shown above with students at a bug buffet) to consult on edible insects. Later, she served on a global team that organized the first world congress on Insects to Feed the World. Two billion people routinely eat insects, says Dunkel, the former editor of the Food Insects Newsletter, “and they’re not at the poverty level. It’s an upscale thing in Mexico, Thailand, Korea, and Kenya.”

There’s a growing buzz about the insect protein market. The UN calls insects an “underutilized resource” especially in light of the need to combat climate change. By 2030, treats such as hazelnut cricket bread, mealworm wild rice, cheddar-flavored roasted scorpions, and termite chips could be part of an $8 billion market, according to Barclays Bank.

“My all-time favorite is grasshopper,” says Dunkel, who harvests them in her backyard garden, roasts them, and sprinkles them on salads. “I do take off the legs, because their spurs can irritate the throat.”

She says that black ants, which she freezes and dries, make a sublime culinary accent, since the formic acid in their venom imparts a lemony zing. “One of my students invented a shortbread recipe that called for lavender and black ants, and it was out of this world,” says Dunkel, who for the past 34 years has hosted an annual Bug Buffet in Bozeman that draws scholars and executives from food-insect companies.

When she began collecting data in 1991 from buffet attendees, only 20 to 30 percent found such cuisine acceptable. Today those numbers are closer to 70 or 80 percent. Dunkel attributes this to increasing interest in nutrition and environmental issues, as it takes less water, land, and food to raise bugs compared to larger animals.

Dunkel declines to predict when — or if — Americans will add bugs to their diets. “I think the disgust factor is still a big elephant in the room,” she admits. But younger generations might break the taboo. Her six grandchildren share her tastes. “As long as insects have chocolate on them, they’re fine with them,” she says.

“Climate change is a shared crisis that requires shared solutions,” says Chancellor Rebecca Blank. Jeff Miller

UW–Madison, together with some 34 partners across the region, launched the Midwest Climate Collaborative in January.

The MCC is a network of organizations committed to accelerating climate action in the Midwest by leveraging science and research, shaping public understanding and policy, advancing climate solutions, and developing leaders. The launch event included a panel discussion on best practices for climate action. Then-undergraduate Natalie Tinsen ’22 and a like-minded student at the University of Minnesota were instrumental in developing a student component of the MCC, which involves annual, virtual conferences to learn about sustainability initiatives at colleges and universities across the country.

“Climate change is a shared crisis that requires shared solutions,” says Chancellor Rebecca Blank, noting that UW–Madison has an important leadership role to play as a founding member of the MCC. “The Midwest Climate Collaborative will do the vital work of convening leading academic institutions, businesses, and community organizations to create those solutions for the entire region.”

The new software is saving airlines millions of dollars each year by helping them avoid delays. Corey Calvert

If you experience fewer air travel delays in the years ahead, you can thank your alma mater. UW–Madison’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) collaborated on new software with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), providing a new tool for the National Weather Service to detect fog and low-lying clouds. The software, which took more than 10 years to develop, uses machine-learning techniques with near real-time data from weather satellites to monitor conditions 24/7 and issue potential fog warnings.

Satellite observations have traditionally struggled to determine the size of fog patches, especially when other clouds were present above the fog. Additionally, previous techniques were limited to nighttime use due to interference from reflected sunlight. Unlike thunderstorms that contain larger raindrops and ice crystals, fog is composed of smaller droplets that do not show up on radar.

The new tool, which circumvents those problems, is known as the GOES-R Fog and Low Stratus product. (GOES-R refers to the nation’s most advanced fleet of weather satellites.) According to CIMSS scientist Corey Calvert, the software “helps identify the type of fog over an area by evaluating every pixel in an image and generating a probability of the presence of fog and its intensity.”

The product is saving airlines millions of dollars each year by helping them avoid delays. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, weather was responsible for nearly 70 percent of flight delays from 2008 to 2013. Each hour of delay costs airlines from $1,000 to $4,000 per flight.

The new tool identifies dangerous conditions for both large and small aircraft and can be used to issue warnings around the country, making air travel safer.