It may come as a surprise, but Colorado State University is home to some of the nation’s leading tropical storm researchers, with scientists in Northern Colorado monitoring hurricanes and other storm systems thousands of miles away.
The university’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, known as CIRA, operates from CSU’s Foothills Campus on the western edge of Fort Collins. Despite the landlocked location, researchers there track tropical storms across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
“I think it catches people by surprise fairly frequently,” said Kate Musgrave, a research scientist with CIRA…