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Content related to ground validation activities and field campaigns.

MC3E Summary from The Earth Observer, January 2012

Document Description

This excerpt from the NASA Earth Observer publication provides and in-depth summary of the Midlatitude Continental Convective Clouds Experiment (MC3E), which took place from April 22nd - June 6th 2011 in central Oklahoma. The overarching goals of the field effort were to provide a complete three-dimensional characterization of precipitation microphysics in the context of improving the reliability of GPM precipitation retrievals over land, and to advance understanding of the primary physical components that form the basis for models that simulate convection and clouds.

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

Falling Snowflakes Seen by the Snow Video Imager

Black and white image of snowflakes from the Snow Video imager
Image Caption
This image of falling snowflakes was taken by the Snow Video Imager (SVI) at one of the auxiliary ground sites at GCPEx, the Steamshow Fairgrounds.

The SVI is set up about a foot off the ground and the snowflakes are falling from top to bottom through the frame. They can bee seen here in different three-dimensional orientations at 5x magnification.

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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

Up in the Air in the DC-8 Over the Weekend

Scientist Gail Skofronick-Jackson standing in the DC-8 aircraft
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
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