Iowa

On a Wednesday afternoon in June, a severe storm outbreak spawned huge thunderstorms across Iowa and western Illinois. NASA's Polarimetric precipitation radar was in place to scan the storms as they swept through the region. "It's unbelievable out here," Walt Petersen of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia wrote in an email dispatch from Traer, Iowa. There, two NASA radars were stationed as part of the Iowa Flood Studies field campaign, which Petersen led, for the Global Precipitation Measurement, or GPM, mission. Caption: A cluster of rain gauges and soil moisture sensors deployed in...

Development of low storm clouds in the atmospheric mixing layer over the NPOL and D3R radars on June 12, 2013 at ~12:00 p.m. CDT. Credit: Walt Petersen /NASA . On Wednesday afternoon, June 12, a severe storm outbreak developed and moved across central and eastern Iowa, and then western Illinois, spawning huge thunderstorms and several tornadoes. NASA's Polarimetric (NPOL) precipitation radar, currently deployed in Iowa as part of the Iowa Flood Studies field campaign for the Global Precipitation Measurement mission, rapidly scanned these storms as they moved across the state. NPOL capturing...

By Ellen Gray, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Original www.nasa.gov Feature (published 4/30/13) Ground data now being collected in northeastern Iowa by the Iowa Flood Studies experiment will evaluate how well NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission satellite rainfall data can be used for flood forecasting. GPM is an international satellite mission that will set a new standard for precipitation measurements from space, providing worldwide estimates of precipitation approximately every three hours. The GPM Core Observatory, provided by NASA and mission partner the Japan Aerospace...