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Faculty Profile

Donald Farley

Department: ECE

Title: J. Preston Levis Professor of Engineering Emeritus

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Degrees earned:
 B.Eng.Phys. Cornell University 1956
 Ph.D. Cornell University 1960

Address:
Office:
 300 Rhodes Hall
 Ithaca, NY, 14853

Office Phone: 255-7121

Biography:

After receiving the doctoral degree, Dr. Farley spent a year at Cambridge University, a year at Chalmers University in Sweden, and then six years in Peru at the Jicamarca Radio Observatory, near Lima, before returning to the United States and joining the Cornell faculty in 1967. He returned to Sweden in 1985 for a year as the Tage Erlander Visiting Professor at the Uppsala Ionospheric Observatory. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member of the American Geophysical Union, the International Scientific Radio Union (URSI), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Research interests:

Since the late 1940s, Cornell has had a strong research program in radio wave and upper atmospheric physics, especially space plasma physics. We now use very powerful radars and sophisticated data-processing techniques to study the earth's atmosphere and ionosphere at altitudes ranging from a few kilometers to several thousand kilometers. Fluctuations in the refractive index of the atmosphere scatter back to the ground a small but detectable portion of a transmitted radar pulse and, with proper analysis of the signal, one can determine many of the parameters of the scattering medium, such as the wind velocity, the passage of atmospheric gravity waves, turbulent transport rates, the electron density, the electron and ion temperatures, the ambient electric field, and the properties of unstable plasma waves. Some aspects of plasma physics are best studied in the "outdoor" laboratory that space provides. These radar studies have taken Cornell faculty, staff, and graduate students to locations such as Peru, northern Scandinavia, the Caribbean, Greenland, and the South Pacific.

Selected Publications:

Farley, D.T., Incoherent scatter radar probing, Chap. 14 (pp 415–439) in Modern Radio Science (H. Kohl, R. Rüster, and K. Schlegel, eds.), European Geophys. Society, Katlenburg-Lindau, FRG, 1996.

 

Haldoupis, C., D.T. Farley, and K. Schlegel, Type-1 echoes from the mid-latitude E-region ionosphere, Ann. Geophys., 15, 908-917, 1997.

 

Aponte, N., W.E. Swartz, and D.T. Farley, Electron energy balance in the F-region above Jicamarca, J. Geophys. Res., 104, 10,041–10,049, 1999.

 

Farley, D.T., John Dougherty: Some recollections, J. Plasma Physics, 64, 315–318, 2000.

 

Rosado-Roman, J. M., W.E. Swartz, and D.T. Farley, Plasma instabilities observed in the E region over Arecibo and a proposed nonlocal theory, J. Atmos. Solar-Terr. Phys., 66, 1593-602, 2004. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jastp.2004.07.005

 

Seyler, C. E., J.M. Rosado-Roman, and D.T. Farley, A nonlocal theory of the gradient-drift instability in the ionospheric E-region plasma at mid-latitudes, J. Atmos. Solar-Terr. Phys., 66, 1627-37, 2004. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jastp.2004.07.01

 

Lu, F., D.T. Farley, and W.E. Swartz, Spread in aspect angles of equatorial E region irregularities, J. Geophys. Res., 113, A11309, doi:10.1029/2008JA013018, 2008.