The US Army has awarded a $700,000 Small Business Technology Transfer Phase II research grant to Optra Inc. of Topsfield, Mass., to fund a cooperative effort with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Optra and the university plan to produce a working prototype of a real-time parallel channel spectrometer for 3-D cloud profiling, which eventually may be used to monitor the location of, and to identify, a chemical or biological weapon release.