Scientists are flying into snowstorms to explore winter weather mysteries
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He's just one of the scientists who was aboard a research plane earlier this month as it flew out of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to travel through a winter storm — part of a research campaign called IMPACTS, or the Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Storms mission.
It's been gathering the kind of information that could someday help weather forecasters better predict whether a winter storm might cause treacherous conditions that would require shutting down schools, closing roads, and canceling flights.
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One of the goals of this project is to better understand the bright "snow bands" that frequently appear in radar maps of winter storms east of the Rocky Mountains.
Scientists have known about these distinctive radar patterns for a couple of decades, but it's still not clear how the bands form or what exactly is going on inside of those clouds, explains McMurdie.
That's why scientists with IMPACTS chart their flight paths to go right through a storm's bands.
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The massive amounts of data gathered from above, below and inside this diverse array of winter storms should give meteorologists much to mull over in the coming years, and hopefully end up incorporated into forecasting models, so that future weather reports will give a better sense of what a storm might be capable of.
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