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Snow - Must be Saturday!

D3R at Care
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

Snow on the Ground, Satellites Overhead

ADMIRARI on the ground with Citation overhead
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. Although the excitement of the lake-effect snow last weekend was welcome, in contrast this week was somewhat benign. There were a number of good opportunities identified in the model forecasts that didn’t really materialize, leaving us with a number of, although marginal, still useful events. The dual-frequency radar at the CARE site Friday, February 17th. The little spec in the sky is the Citation aircraft flying overhead. Credit: NASA / Chris

More Snow Photos

ADMIRARI radar at sunset
NASA scientist Chris Kidd shared some of his photos from the last several days at GCPEx: The ADMIRARI instrument at the CARE site with blowing light snow (11 Feb 2012) Credit: NASA / Chris Kidd The radar at the CARE site with blowing light snow (11 Feb 2012) Credit: NASA / Chris Kidd The ADMIRARI instrument operating at the CARE site (11 Feb 2012) The lights on the instrument allows remote operators to keep and eye on any snow build up on the sensors that would affect the measurements. Credit: NASA / Chris Kidd Mission operations inside the CARE trailer – which can be very cold at times! (11

Lake Effect Parking

Snow covered cars at GCPEx
Over the weekend, GCPEx had its first large lake effect snow, which put 2 inches down at the CARE site. Chris Kidd, Operations Scientist for GCPEx this week, said in an email, "We were feeling rather poorly done-by at CARE due to the lack of snow there. However, we cheered up as we got back to Barrie [12 miles up the road where the GCPEx team is staying]. About 12+ inches here!" Parking lot at the GCPEx team's hotel in Barrie, Ontario. They were very excited to be buried in a foot of snow. Credit: NASA / Chris Kidd Lake effect snow forms when cold winds pick up moisture and energy as they pass

Waiting for Snow

Multiple ground instruments at the CARE site
In the CARE operations trailer monitoring weather conditions during the DC-8 flights on 6 February 2012 at approximately 9pm EST. Gail Skofronick-Jackson is the Deputy Project Scientist for GPM at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. She specializes in the remote sensing of snow, and is currently the mission scientist for the campaign at the CARE ground site in Ontario, Canada. She writes to us about a night flight on February 6 and the snow that didn't show. Models showed quickly developing snow from 9-10pm EST tonight (6 Feb 2012). We are at 9:22 and we don't yet see snow in the

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

Uncooperative Mother Nature

Walt Petersen is the Ground Validation Scientist for GPM, based at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. He manages all of GPM's ground validation operations including GCPEx, and today writes to us from the CARE site in Ontario. It is January 23rd and once again Mother Nature has shown us what she thinks of our field campaign plans…..and our ability to plan and execute based on a prediction of what she will throw our way. Kind of bizarre really; we came up here to sample strong Canadian snow storms, and today we ended up targeting a heavy rain event. Of course, we can plan -- as we did -- but
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