Page 6 - Aerotech News and Review, Dec. 6, 2019

NASA embarks on

five U.S. expeditions

targeting air, land, sea

NASA is sending five airborne cam- sphere, where most weather occurs. A
paigns across the United States in 2020 flotilla of autonomous gliders and floats
to investigate fundamental processes will take to the Pacific Ocean to measure
that ultimately impact human lives and temperature and salinity at and below
the environment, from snowstorms the water’s surface to better understand
along the East Coast to ocean eddies the exchange of heat between ocean and
off the coast of San Francisco. atmosphere. Researchers will descend
Science teams will embark by land, on wetlands by foot and boat to study
sea and air as part of multi-year cam- how sea level rise is affecting delta eco-
paigns funded by NASA’s Earth Ven- systems.
ture program. This is NASA’s third The five new Earth Venture inte-
series of competitively selected Earth grated airborne and surface field cam-
Venture suborbital investigations. paigns begin their first year of field work
NASA uses the vantage point of in 2020, running from January through
space to increase our understanding October. NASA image
of our home planet, improve lives and Five new NASA field research campaigns investigating a number of phenomena across the United States get underway
safeguard our future. To gain a more Intense snowfall events this year.
complete picture of how and why our On the densely populated U.S. East
planet is changing, the agency also Coast, winter snowstorms are both fre- airborne study of these snowstorms, to understand why they form and how then, making now an opportune time to
sponsors intensive field campaigns tar- quent and disruptive. Snowstorms can which heads into the field in January, they evolve with the developing storm. close the knowledge gap on snowstorms
geting critical science issues that can shut down roads and close businesses aims to get a better handle on how snow If we can understand the processes in and help scientists improve how they
benefit from a deeper look by taking and are hazardous for anyone caught in is distributed in the clouds. the clouds, we can better predict how interpret satellite data and incorporate
advantage of NASA’s capabilities in them. The storm and cloud processes re- “People see pictures of these big they distribute snowfall to us on the
airborne science. sponsible for snowstorms are often inac- swaths of clouds and think they’re ground.” them into weather forecasting models.
Campaigns will conduct science on curately reproduced by forecast models snowing everywhere, but they’re not,” IMPACTS is the first major field The ER-2 will fly out of Hunter Army
a variety of platforms. High-altitude and are difficult to measure from space, said IMPACTS principal investiga- campaign to study East Coast snow- Airfield in Savanna, Georgia, and the
aircraft will observe chemistry in the resulting in poor snowfall predictions. tor Lynn McMurdie at the University storms in 30 years. The instrumentation P-3 will fly out of NASA’s Wallops
stratosphere, far beyond the reach of The Investigation of Microphysics of Washington in Seattle. “Inside the that will fly on NASA’s ER-2 high-alti- Flight Facility in Virginia.
commercial planes, to study the impact and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast- clouds are these long narrow regions of tude aircraft and P-3 cloud-sampling air-
of intense storms that breach the tropo- Threatening Snowstorms, or IMPACTS, more intense snow bands. We’re trying craft is a significant advancement since See NASA, Page 7

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