Science

The Olympic Mountain Experiment (OLYMPEX) The Olympic Mountain Experiment, or OLYMPEX, was a NASA-led field campaign, which took place on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State from November 2015 through February 2016. The goal of the campaign was to collect detailed atmospheric measurements that will be used to evaluate how well rain-observing satellites measure rainfall and snowfall from space. In particular, OLYMPEX assessed satellite measurements made by the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission Core Observatory, a joint mission by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration...

Integrated Precipitation and Hydrology EXperiment The Integrated Precipitation and Hydrology Experiment (IPHEx) is a ground validation field campaign that will take place in the southern Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States from May 1 to June 15, 2014. IPHEx is co-led by NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement mission, with partners at Duke University and NOAA's Hydrometerological Testbed. The field campaign has two primary goals. The first is to evaluate how well observations from precipitation-monitoring satellites, including the recently launched GPM Core Observatory, match up...

When asked to picture the shape of raindrops, many of us will imagine water looking like tears that fall from our eyes, or the stretched out drip from a leaky faucet. This popular misconception is often reinforced in weather imagery associated with predictions and forecasts. Raindrops are actually shaped like the top of a hamburger bun, round on the top and flat on the bottom. A new video from the Global Precipitation Measurement mission explains why. This short video explains how a raindrop falls through the atmosphere and why a more accurate look at raindrops can improve estimates of global...

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...