The last time NASA carried out an in-depth study of winter storms in the heavily populated Northeast, the Berlin Wall had just come down and George H.W. Bush occupied the White House.
That changed in mid-January when a team led by University of Washington researcher Lynn McMurdie began a six-week campaign to better understand how snow bands form and evolve.
The team began deploying a suite of complementary, tried-and-true remote-sensing and in-situ instruments aboard two NASA research aircraft flying at different altitudes — one above the storm and the other within it. With this data, scientists want to get a greater understanding of these poorly understood processes, improve snowfall measurement from space, and further forecasters’ ability to predict snowfall accumulation.
“Technology has improved dramatically over the past 30 years,” said Gerry Heymsfield, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and deputy principal investigator of the Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms, or IMPACTS, mission funded by NASA’s Earth Venture-Suborbital Program. “Now is an ideal time to conduct a well-equipped study.”
Continue reading at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Image via NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
