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GCPEx Flight Summaries

GPM flying over Earth with a data swath visualized.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Summary will be updated on Fridays through the remainder of the campaign. Latest Update: 2/29/12 Date: February 25 Time: 1600 UTC Event Type: Lake Effect Aircraft: DC-8 Summary: The DC-8 flew home to Dryden Research Flight Center (DRFC) along some points that intersected with light orographic snows in New England and Lake Effect Snows in New York State. The DC-8 intersected snow over the White Mountains near Berlin and Green Mountains south of Rutland before vectoring near Utica, NY, crossing a Lake Effect Snow band southeast of Syracuse, and then traversing just north of a band across the...
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Three Days, Two Snowstorms

Vijay Mishra cleans ice off the D3R
Joe Munchak is a scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center who specializes in remote sensing of snow. This week he is at the CARE site in Ontario as one of the operations scientists for the GCPEx ground validation. It’s been a relatively eventful few days here in Barrie, Ontario, with two coordinated air-ground campaigns over the past three days. I was actually driving to Barrie from my home in Maryland during the first event (January 28th), and got to experience some lake effect snow bands first-hand in northern Pennsylvania on my way up. These were very narrow, only a few miles wide, but

GCPEx: What We Don't Know About Snow

NASA's D3R radar at the GCPEx field campaign.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
By Ellen Gray, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Original www.nasa.gov Feature (published 1/31/12) Predicting the future is always a tricky business -- just watch a TV weather report. Weather forecasts have come a long way, but almost every season there's a snowstorm that seems to come out of nowhere, or one that's forecast as 'the big one' that turns out to be a total bust. In the last ten years, scientists have shown that it is possible to detect falling snow and measure surface snowpack information from the vantage point of space. But there remains much that is unknown about the fluffy white...
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Snowflakes!

Snowflake images in black and white taken by the Snow Video Imager
This image of falling snowflakes was taken by the Snow Video Imager (SVI) at one of the auxiliary ground sites, the Steamshow Fairgrounds, 5 miles (8km) south of the main CARE site, during a light snowfall on Saturday, January 21. The SVI is set up about two feet off the ground and the snowflakes are falling from top to bottom through the frame. They can be seen here in different three-dimensional orientations at 5x magnification. In the top left corner and the center right, you can see two examples of classic six-sided dendrite snowflakes. The other flakes with crystals growing up and down

Falling Snowflakes Seen by the Snow Video Imager

Black and white image of snowflakes from the Snow Video imager
Image Caption
This image of falling snowflakes was taken by the Snow Video Imager (SVI) at one of the auxiliary ground sites at GCPEx, the Steamshow Fairgrounds.

The SVI is set up about a foot off the ground and the snowflakes are falling from top to bottom through the frame. They can bee seen here in different three-dimensional orientations at 5x magnification.

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