About

Bradley M. Isom, Ph.D. is the founder of Isom Technology, LLC and a Principal Radar and RF Systems Engineer at Blue Origin, where he leads development of the lunar landing radar system designed to safely return humans to the Moon.

Over more than two decades in radar systems and remote sensing, Brad has worked across academia, national laboratories, start-ups, and industry — contributing to projects ranging from mobile phased array weather radars to airborne hurricane-hunting altimeters to commercial spaceborne weather radar systems. He led system development at Tomorrow.io for airborne and spaceborne weather radar platforms, and previously served as VP of Radar System Development at StormQuant, where he defined the technical vision and led development of an innovative IoT X-band dual-polarization Doppler weather radar. Earlier, he maintained and enhanced a network of 33 research-grade radar systems across multiple frequency bands at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and served as Director of the Atmospheric Measurement Laboratory.

His research interests include polarimetric parameter estimation, dynamic clutter mitigation (including wind turbine interference), pulse compression and waveform design, advanced signal and array processing, weather radar simulation, and the design of novel remote sensing systems for both terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments. Brad holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Oklahoma and a B.S. in Computer Engineering with a minor in Astrophysics from the University of Nebraska. He is an active member of the IEEE and the American Meteorological Society.

Books & Book Chapters

  1. Y. K. Sasaki, M. R. Kumjian, and B. Isom, "Entropic Balance Theory and Radar Observation for Prospective Tornado Data Assimilation," in Data Assimilation for Atmospheric, Oceanic and Hydrologic Applications (Vol. II), S. K. Park and L. Xu, Eds. New York: Springer, 2013, pp. 429–464.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

  1. B. Isom, R. D. Palmer, G. S. Secrest, R. D. Rhoton, D. Saxion, L. Allmon, J. Reed, T. Crum, and R. Vogt, "Detailed Observations of Wind Turbine Clutter with Scanning Weather Radars," Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, vol. 26, pp. 894–910, 2009.
  2. J. Meier, R. Kelley, B. Isom, M. Yeary, and R. D. Palmer, "Leveraging Software Defined Radio Techniques for Digital Weather Radar Receiver Design," IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, vol. 61, no. 6, pp. 1571–1582, 2012.
  3. B. Isom, R. D. Palmer, R. Kelley, J. Meier, D. Bodine, M. Yeary, B. Cheong, Y. Zhang, T. Yu, M. Biggerstaff, "The Atmospheric Imaging Radar: Simultaneous Volumetric Observations Using a Phased Array Weather Radar," Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, vol. 30, pp. 655–675, 2013.
  4. F. Uysal, I. Selesnick, B. M. Isom, "Mitigation of Wind Turbine Clutter for Weather Radar by Signal Separation," IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol. 54, no. 5, pp. 2925–2934, 2016.
  5. A. D. Byrd, I. R. Ivic, R. D. Palmer, B. M. Isom, B.-L. Cheong, A. Schenkman, M. Xue, "A Weather Radar Simulator for the Evaluation of Polarimetric Phased Array Performance," IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol. 54, no. 7, pp. 4178–4189, 2016.
  6. J. M. Kurdzo, F. Nai, D. J. Bodine, T. A. Bonin, B. Isom, R. D. Palmer, B.-L. Cheong, J. Lujan, A. Mahre, and A. D. Byrd, "Observations of Severe Local Storms and Tornadoes with the Atmospheric Imaging Radar," Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., vol. 98, no. 5, pp. 915–935, 2017.
  7. Y. Zhang et al. (incl. B. Isom), "The ARM Cloud Radar Simulator for Global Climate Models: A New Tool for Bridging Field Data and Climate Models," Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., vol. 99, no. 1, pp. 21–26, 2018.
  8. K. Lamer, B. Puigdomènech Treserras, Z. Zhu, B. Isom, N. Bharadwaj, and P. Kollias, "Characterization of shallow oceanic precipitation using profiling and scanning radar observations at the Eastern North Atlantic ARM observatory," Atmospheric Measurement Techniques, vol. 12, no. 9, pp. 4931–4947, 2019.
  9. P. Kollias et al. (incl. B. Isom), "The ARM Radar Network: At the Leading-edge of Cloud and Precipitation Observations," Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., vol. 101, no. 5, pp. E588–E607, 2020.
  10. P. Kollias et al. (incl. B. Isom), "Leading Edge Radar: The Upgraded ARM Network," Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., vol. 101, no. 8, pp. 703–708, 2020.
  11. C. Bjorland, Z. Jelenak, J. Sapp, C. Shoup, B. Isom, P. Chang, J. Carswell, "Ocean-Surface Retracking in Tropical Cyclones with the KaIA Airborne Radar Altimeter," IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, vol. 18, pp. 6480-6491, 2025, doi: 10.1109/JSTARS.2025.3542635.

Technical Reports

  1. P. Moriarty, N. Hamilton, M. Debnath, T. Herges, B. Isom, J. K. Lundquist, D. Maniaci, B. Naughton, R. Pauly, J. Roadman, W. Shaw, J. van Dam, and S. Wharton, American WAKE experimeNt (AWAKEN). United States, 2020. doi:10.2172/1659798.