Timothy Lang (ST11) is a coauthor on an article titled, “An Airborne Multi-Band Microwave Analysis of Precipitation Within Two Winter Cyclones,” which was recently accepted for publication in the Monthly Weather Review. The article – which was led by Amanda Richter, formerly of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) – studied the complementarity of various microwave sensors in observing clouds and precipitation within winter storms.
The sensors included the Advanced Microwave Precipitation Radiometer (AMPR; managed by Marshall), the Conical Scanning Millimeter-wave Imaging Radiometer (CoSMIR), and the High-Altitude Imaging Wind and Rain Airborne Profiler (HIWRAP) radar. All of these instruments flew on the NASA ER-2 aircraft during the Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms (IMPACTS) field campaign, which had three deployments during 2020-2023.
Richter and Lang specifically studied two winter storms during the 2020 field season, one of which was over the water and consisted of mostly rain at the surface, and one of which was over land and featured a mixture of snow and rain. The lower-frequency AMPR and the higher-frequency CoSMIR instruments were very complementary, with AMPR able to identify important features like heavy rainfall and a sloping melting layer over the water, and able to detect the changeover from rain to snow over land. Meanwhile, CoSMIR was more sensitive to high-level clouds, and was able to detect convective-like turrets associated with enhanced precipitation over land or ocean. However, both radiometers struggled to fully resolve snowfall over land, and the detection of that was where the nadir-looking HIWRAP provided great value. The combined use of all three instruments compensated for individual deficiencies and was very effective at characterizing overall winter storm structure. This publication stems from Amanda Richter’s NASA-funded UAH Master’s thesis, and she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma.
Read the article at: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/mwre/aop/MWR-D-23-0104.1/MWR-D-23-0104.1.xml.
