to meet a part that is vladimir putin. we talked a moment ago about the towers. you needed to have putin's permission, to do anything in moscow really. trump had to hook up with an oligarch, in this case an oligarch friendly to put in. he's already in debt with this trump regime. he starts tweeting immediately new013, "will go to be my bff?" sundaynd "afterwards" night on c-span twos book tv. year, c-span is touring cities across the country exploring american history. next, a look at our visit to norman, oklahoma. you're watching "american

history tv" all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. >> the national weather center is a really unique confederation of federal, state, and academic units all housed in the same building and we are working on analyzing all of the different time and space skills of the atmosphere so we can figure out what is going on. we have a variety of different folks that make up the building. it is part university of oklahoma and part national oceanic and atmospheric administration. it is a collaboration between the two groups. this is technically a university of oklahoma building, so we have amenities on both sides, in addition to from the state of oklahoma as well. we have meteorologists,

climatologists, students, faculty, staff, technicians, everyone working together to study earth's atmosphere. we officially broke ground for the national weather center in november 2002 and opened and dedicated the building september 29th of 2006. we are almost at 12 years operation here at the national weather center in 2018. the building did not exist before we opened the doors in september of 2006. both the entities were in separate buildings. this was a way to put everyone together in a collaborative space. we are now standing in the atrium of the national weather center and behind me, this is a showstopper in the building. it is installed in over 100 locations across the globe. if you go to the science center or another agency, you find these on display. the global display system, the globe itself is six feet in diameter. i use four surrounding projectors to project on the surface and we stitch them

together so it looks like it is one unison image. we can bring up atmospheric products, ocean, astronomy, literally anything you wanted to -- you want it to be. it can be the death star, it can be a fifth goal, it can be a disco ball, and it can be for promotional purposes. there is really a showstopper in the building. right now, we are the vehicle bay, number one in the nation in severe weather and you get a good image behind me. we have a lot of tools we use to get our information from storms. we have here one of our mobile displays. we have observations scattered all over the u.s. in various places. the problem is they are static and they don't move. they're not always where storms are located.

we want to figure out what is happening in both parts of the storms. we made those mobile by attaching them to vehicles as you see right here. we have a hail of proof -- hail-proof guard on top of the vehicle here to make sure if we are underneath the storm producing some large and damaging hail, it won't damage the windshield or anything here. then we will take out of these and get information inside the storms, everything from windspeed and when direction using this at the top. temperature and moisture measurements, here sitting on the front. pressure measurements, a variety of different instruments that do all of that. there is an antenna and gps at the top to communicate with everybody in the field campaign so we know where to situate ourselves and make sure everyone is collecting the information they need to in those. we have one here, one in the outside vehicle bay area and to during -- and during larger experiments we will get additional vehicles, anywhere upward of 10 of these so we can do a lot of observations from a variety of different storms happening all over the place.

these are our local ones here at the weather center. we are number one in the nation radar research. the reason is doppler radar in the u.s. it started with the national severe storm. we have 159 doppler radars all over the u.s., but the problem again is they are not always exactly where the storm is. if we look at a storm really far away, we are looking several tens of thousands of feet above where the actual storm is. earth is tilting away when we send that out. we got the idea to make those radars mobile. we have one of our shared mobile atmospheric smart radars. this is a joint project between the school of meteorology here at the university of oklahoma and also the national severe storms laboratory. it is a really impressive system. we have two of the smart radars and the storm has another radar part here.

we will take these anywhere we have the funding to do so. we have taken them to the east coast and the gulf coast, scan hurricanes when they make landfall, obviously to look at severe weather here in the central and southern lance. we have taken our radars to vancouver to scan snowfall during the olympics. we have also disassembled these radars and sent them across oceans to do a variety of different projects. we sent one of these radars to france to do a lightning and precipitation project. we also sent these to do tropical rainfall experiments. anywhere that we have funding, we will take these. they are not just locked to the ground here in the u.s. we will take them anywhere we have funding to do so. this is why our severe weather research chair is so good. radar technology was developed during the early days of world war ii.

primarily in england, contributions from the united states, and the idea was to detect planes and went on to detect missiles later, but mostly to detect planes and some -- and submarines in early days. weather was not something that they wanted, it was a problem. they were looking for point targets. after the war, it became obvious you could detect weather in distributed targets. radars were modified and being improved. the first weather radars came from the military and they had been in airplanes and defense installations. they transferred to the civilian part of the federal government. a lot of weather radar research was right here in oklahoma by the national severe storms laboratory and the university of oklahoma. many of the improvements, we are proud of those because we have in large part done that development. radars send out a pulse of a -- electromagnetic radiation. those pulses bounce off of targets. in the case of the weather radar, the targets are

precipitation particles. we can return energy back to the radar. from that, we get the location and intensity of precipitation, and then you get the velocity information, and we have something called dual polarization where we alternate our waves horizontally and vertically. from that, we get a lot of size and types of precipitation and particles, we can discriminate one particle type from another. the weather radar does all of that now. it did not used to during the time of my career, many of those things have been added. weather data now is collected in many different locations around the united states, the primary network is federal government network.

it is three agencies of the federal government. department of commerce, the national weather service, department of defense, primarily the air force, and the department of transportation, we share this radar network and those data are collected for the use of the agencies and then shared with anyone who would like to get the data. ours is a different system than other places in the world where even the government felt that radar data or other weather data to the public, in our country, we don't do it. -- even the government sell that radar data or other weather data to the public, in our country, we do not do that. we share the data and make it available. if you see weather radar data on television, it could be coming from one of our government radars. we have a long history with radar. we want to continue to make radars at her. where we are going now, the next

big innovation that will provide improvements to the forecast that we give, it is something we called to -- we want to take the data from the radar and other sensors, the surface stations and other kinds of data from aircraft or drones, whatever we can get, but a lot of it is driven by radar. we want to simulate that entire resolution, be able to run those models in real time, and we want to be able to forecast the future state of the storms even to the point of predicting tornadoes 30 minutes or even one hour ahead of time. we could issue warnings with long lead time. long lead time means we would have to figure out how to treat them because of you tell someone a tornado is coming in one hour, he may not take shelter right then. there are people in groups who need long lead times. we want to give them information and bring the public into knowledge of the weather and knowledge of the warning and knowledge of what to do to be safe. >> the stuff we do here at the national weather center impacts everybody. this is a one-of-a-kind facility. it does not exist anywhere else

in our galaxy. this is the only national weather center. we really are a tourist destination for the state of oklahoma and for the entire country in the world because everyone is interested in the weather and they want to see what is going on in our >> our cities tour staff travel to norman, oklahoma to learn about its rich history. learn more about norman and other stops on our tour on c-span.org/citiestour. you're watching american history tv all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. >> c-span, where history unfolds daily. created as aan was public service by america's companies.ision today, we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress,

the white house, the supreme court, and public policy events in washington dc and around the country. c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. next on american history tv, congressional research service analyst jane armstrong hudiburg talks about the life and legacy of suffragette, pacifist, and politician jeannette rankin. the first woman elected to congress. the u.s. capitol historical society posted this event. it is about 55 minutes. >> today, we are here to listen ,o jane armstrong hudiburg who is an old friend of the society. as i understand it only your first -- your first involvement falling in love with the capital was as a tour guide with the capital guide service. she was a writer and researcher for the senate history office.