NC State is home to nearly 800 student organizations. From beekeeping and ballroom dancing to developing apps and building robots, clubs provide a way for students to explore their interests and develop professional skills outside the classroom. For members of the Sounding Club, it has also been a way to contribute to weather safety. 

In January and February 2026, members of the Sounding Club spent many evenings launching weather balloons from the rooftop of Jordan Hall as part of the second season of the Atmospheric River Reconnaissance Coordinated University Sounding Program (AR Recon CUSP).  

The program, led by the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at University of California San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography, partners with 16 universities in the U.S. and Canada to collect data on atmospheric rivers and other high-impact weather events. NC State is the only university partner in North Carolina, and one of the few on the East Coast. The Sounding Club will continue to participate in AR Recon CUSP in 2027, and there are plans to expand the program to a total of about 25 universities.  

“What the partner universities do is add more data points,” said Katie Wilson ’26, a meteorology graduate who served as the 2025-26 vice president of the Sounding Club. “You’re kind of playing connect-the-dots when it comes to weather forecasting. The more dots — or data points — you have, the more detailed an image you have of what you’re looking at. And that image is what goes into forecasting models to help improve predictions surrounding severe weather events.”

Students Making a Real-World Impact

NC State’s participation in AR Recon CUSP is unique in that it’s almost entirely student-led. Allison Michaelis, assistant professor in the Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, serves as the lead coordinator for the program, but it was students who planned launches, deployed weather balloons and tracked radiosonde output through the atmosphere. 

“Programs like AR Recon CUSP allow students to connect with people and opportunities outside of the university and broaden their perspectives on how science is conducted and how that science can have real-world impacts,” Michaelis said. 

The Sounding Club members engaged in interinstitutional coordination and collaboration, something they might not otherwise have had the opportunity to do as undergraduate students. 

“I would attend weekly meetings with the whole AR Recon CUSP team, which mostly consisted of professors or graduate students,” said Rebecca Moore ’26, a meteorology graduate who served as the 2025-26 president of the Sounding Club. “I was the odd one out as an undergraduate student. We would go over the plan for the week and then discuss how our data’s doing, if it’s being ingested into the models and how it’s helping people.” 

Launching weather balloons for AR Recon CUSP also allowed students to work with raw data, a change from the idealized scenarios they analyze in the classroom. Not only did this give students hands-on experience, but also the opportunity to contribute to something beyond themselves and beyond NC State. 

“While we may not have directly input data into the models, we stayed late and launched all those weather balloons,” Wilson said. “We played a part in a much bigger picture.”

The data the group collected also served another purpose. On several occasions, the Sounding Club shared it with the National Weather Service’s Raleigh office, which is located on NC State’s campus.

“If there was a storm coming, they would reach out and ask if we were doing a launch anytime soon. And then we would give them our data and provide some help there,” Moore said.  

For many of the meteorology students in the Sounding Club, participating in AR Recon CUSP reaffirmed their decision to pursue a career in the field. 

“A lot of us went into meteorology because we wanted to help people through weather and through this project, we got to do that,” said Katherine Fowler ’26, a meteorology graduate who served as the 2025-26 secretary of the Sounding Club.  

Making the Most of Meteorological Instruments

Meteorology graduate Kat Caughron ’25, who is now working toward her master’s in atmospheric sciences at NC State, laid the groundwork for the Sounding Club to become part of AR Recon CUSP. 

The intense launch schedule over the winter of 2026 was a far cry from the Sounding Club’s activity a few years ago. Caughron had joined the Sounding Club as a first-year meteorology student in 2021, but it began to fall to the wayside during the COVID-19 pandemic. Caughron became the club’s president her senior year and built the club back up. 

“We had access to all of these meteorological instruments, and they weren’t being used,” Caughron said. “It made sense to get launches going and let students experiment with the instruments and get familiar with the type of work they might experience in their future jobs.”

At the end of the 2024-25 academic year, Caughron connected with Michaelis on a meteorology community forum. Michaelis had not yet started her position at NC State, but let Caughron know she’d been working with AR Recon CUSP and the Sounding Club could consider participating upon her arrival.

“I passed that information along to the next year’s elected officers, and they were able to really run with it,” Caughron said. “That was a fun baton handoff.”

The students not only improved their technical skills while working with AR Recon CUSP, but developed soft skills that will help them as they enter the workforce. There were times when the launches did not go as planned, and the students had to employ problem-solving and communication skills to get back on course. 

“There was one instance when we launched a balloon, looked in our hands, and realized we were still holding the instrument that’s supposed to be attached to the balloon,” Wilson said. “We launched a balloon  with no instrument, which means it wasn’t collecting any data.”

Thanks to the system they had in place — they each had specific responsibilities but were cross-trained to be able to fill in for one another — the students still managed to launch another balloon within the designated time frame.

The project also allowed students to mentor one another, with juniors and seniors advising younger students on which classes to take, helping them with homework and guiding them through launches. 

“We got to help educate underclassmen about sonic instruments and real-life data collection, as opposed to what they see in their textbooks,” Fowler said. 

The supportive environment extends to NC State’s meteorology undergraduate program as a whole. 

“There were only 15 of us in our graduating class and we had class together for four years straight,” Moore said. “We worked together on schoolwork and helped each other advance in our graduate and professional careers. We’re all really close.” 

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Funding for AR Recon CUSP is provided by the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes under their Forecast Informed Reservoir Operations Program with the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center.

The principal investigator for AR Recon CUSP is Marty Ralph from the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at University of California San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Allison Michaelis from NC State is the program’s lead coordinator.