GCPEx Blog

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

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 in Bangor, Maine where the DC-8 airborne research laboratory is stationed for the GCPEx campaign. She wrote to us over the weekend about Saturday's flight to get background measurements from no-snow conditions. Interior of the DC-8 plane. Look at all that legroom! Credit: NASA / Gail Skofronick-Jackson Today we are taking a short flight to measure surface information over our GCPEx field campaign region. It is important

GPM's ground validation scientist, Walt Petersen sent us our first photos from the CARE site in Ontario, Canada. Snow's already on the ground, now we're just waiting for more to fall! The University of Bonn ADMIRARI Radiometer deployed at the CARE site. It measures microwaves that are naturally emitted from Earth's surface to determine water vapor and cloud and liquid water in the air column. Credit: NASA / Walt Petersen The NASA D3R radar deployed at the CARE site. This radar scans the air column for snow falling from the clouds to the ground. It uses two frequencies that together can

Today the GPM Cold-weather Precipitation Experiment (GCPEx) officially began, and instead of snow, all that came down from the sky was cold rain. Location of the GCPEx experiment Fortunately Environment Canada's Weather Office says significant snow (and, yes, freezing rain, too) is on the horizon for Southern Ontario, where ground stations instrumented to within an inch of their lives are situated. The main GCPEx ground station is at the Centre for Atmospheric Research Experiments (CARE) in Egbert, Ontario, about 44 miles (70 km) north of Toronto and about 27 miles (44 km) southeast of Lake