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Ground Validation and GPM

Ground validation radars.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory, launched on Feb. 27, 2015, from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, will help advance our understanding of Earth's water and energy cycles, improve the forecasting of extreme events that cause natural disasters, and extend current capabilities of using satellite precipitation information to directly benefit society. The GPM mission will provide unprecedented data on rain and snowfall. The science instruments on the GPM Core Observatory will provide data that will yield the greatest clarity on rain and snow yet gathered from orbiting...
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GCPEx Data Collection Summary and Example Observations

GPM flying over Earth with a data swath visualized.
Friday, November 2, 2012
In total, 25 events were identified with two events classified as “clear air” flights conducted by the DC-8 to sample land surface emission characteristics. Table 4 summarizes case date and time, event type, and airborne data collection during the field project. Event total SWE amounts represent manual measurements taken by a Tretyakov gauge located inside a DFIR wind shield at CARE. Precipitation types are characterized as rain (R), snow (S), or mixed precipitation that could include ice pellets (R/S). Synoptic context/regime(s) were determined from the daily synopsis produced by the project...
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GCPEx Wraps Up Cold Season Field Campaign
Video Embed
JacobAdmin Wed, 03/21/2012

For six weeks in Ontario, Canada, scientists and engineers lead a field campaign to study the science and mechanics of falling snow. The datasets retrieved will be used to generate algorithms which translate what the GPM Core satellite "sees" into precipitation rates, including that of falling snow. Ground validation science manager Walt Petersen gives a summary of the GCPEx field campaign. Field campaigns are critical in improving satellite observations and precipitation measurements. 

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Six Week GCPEx Campaign Concludes

February 29 marked the last day of the GPM Cold Season Experiment. After six weeks of no snow, light snow, rain, and some nice heavy snowstorms, the GCPEx team is heading home. The ADMIRARI instrument at the CARE site with blowing light snow (11 Feb 2012) Credit: NASA / Chris Kidd The campaign ended with a big storm last Friday, February 24th, that put all three planes in the air over an eight hour period. They captured a wide array of different types of snow and rain from Eastern New York as the DC-8 flew in from Maine to north of the CARE site in Huronia and Georgian Bay, off of Lake Huron

Saving the Best for Last - Prelude to a Storm

DC-8 Cockpit
Joe Munchak is a scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center who specializes in remote sensing of snow. This week he writes from the air in the DC-8 out of Bangor, Maine. Last time I wrote for the GCPEx blog, I was stationed in Barrie, Ontario with the ground team. I’ve since switched hats to that of CoSMIR Instrument Scientist. CoSMIR (Conically Scanning Millimeter Imaging Radiometer) is one of two instruments on the NASA DC-8 which is based out of Bangor, Maine – my home for the past ten days. With CoSMIR and the Airborne Precipitation Radar-2 (APR2), the DC-8 is acting as a simulator for the

Operations Update with Steve Nesbitt (video)

View on Youtube This video shows a glimpse of operations during the NASA Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Cold Season Precipitation Experiment (GCPEx) during a heavy snow event on 18 February 2012 Steve Nesbitt is an assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He studies clouds and precipitation using satellite data and ground based and aircraft observations in projects world wide. Using NASA and other measurements in tropical storms, and mid-latitude cyclones, his research group works to improve the understanding of precipitation
Snow - Must be Saturday!
D3R at Care
JacobAdmin Tue, 02/21/2012
Chris Kidd is a hydrologist at Goddard Space Flight Center. This week he is at the CARE site in Ontario and writes to us about this week's flights. Isn’t it strange how the best snow tends to occur on the same day of the week; when I was little it was always a Thursday. Last Saturday we had a good lake effect snowfall over Barrie (Ontario), this Saturday we had another 6 inches of snow. The forecast proved to accurate in terms of the timing; a 3:15 am start from the hotel to drive out to the field site and prepare for the days operations; the first flakes of snow started to fall as I arrived
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