In the 1990s, Katzberg and James Garrison, a NASA colleague who is currently at Purdue University, continued to study the usefulness of GPS in remote sensing for environmental information. As he did, signal receiver technology and software processing also improved.
Around 2000, Katzberg and Garrison began to ask if GPS could be used to measure the speed of ocean surface winds. "The real brass ring was ocean surface winds in hurricanes," he said.
NASA partnered with NOAA to get GPS receivers on Hurricane Hunter airplanes. "By about 2006 we had developed the required calibration," said Katzberg. This month, Katzberg and colleagues published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Radio Science that demonstrates how their efforts have paid off in terms of accuracy.
"We're using something that most people would ignore, because GPS is transmitting all the time," said Katzberg