David Hysell
Associate Professor
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

An expert on plasma waves in Earth’s ionosphere, David Hysell spends much of his time traveling around the world, using Cornell radar observatories at Arecibo in Puerto Rico and Jicamarca in Peru, or carrying his own portable radar system to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands and to Anchorage, Alaska.

Using coherent and incoherent scatter processes, he studies instability in the ionosphere, gathering data on the density, temperature, composition, and dynamics of the ionosphere and upper atmosphere.

Before coming to Cornell in January 2002, Hysell was a physics professor at Clemson University in South Carolina and a post-doctoral researcher with Cornell’s Space Plasma Physics Group, doing joint research in Russia and Ukraine. Before that, he was a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering at Cornell, where he received his PhD in 1992.

Hysell enjoys the challenge of his work, which has applications in terrestrial and satellite communications. He likes designing and building his own hardware, then processing the mountains of data that "at first glance look like noise, so you have to work very, very hard to extract any meaning from them, which is what we do."

"It’s great fun, because in order to get this information, you have to travel great distances and pump large amounts of power through enormous radars," he says. He is getting ready for a series of trips in the next few months, including visits to France, Japan, and Peru, where he’ll be working with a grant from NASA to send his six rockets into the equatorial ionosphere. "There’s a lot of signal processing involved, a lot of instrumentation, a lot of optimizing and designing hardware. They’re all things that are fun to do, and at the end of the day, we get some useful parameters."

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