CARE

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

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

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