NASA Satellites Capture Data on Monster Winter Storm Affecting 30 States

One of the largest winter storms since the 1950s is affecting 30 U.S. states today with snow, sleet, freezing rain and rain. NASA satellites have gathering data on the storm that stretches from Texas and the Rockies to the New England states.

NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites have been providing visible, infrared and microwave looks at the storm system's clouds, precipitation, temperatures and extent.

Visible and infrared images and animations of the storm's clouds and movement are created every 15 minutes by the NASA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. using data from GOES-11 and GOES-13, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites. The GOES-13 and GOES-11 satellites that cover the eastern and western U.S., respectively, are operated by NOAA.

A visible image captured by the GOES-13 satellite this morning, Feb. 1 at 1401 UTC (9:01 a.m. EST) showed the low pressure area stretching from the Colorado Rockies and Texas east to New England and a massive area of clouds over the Midwest. The image showed what appeared to be "tails" over Texas and the Gulf coast. Those "tails" are areas where severe thunderstorms are possible today. To see an animation of the last two days of GOES-13 satellite images that show the progression of the storm,

Another amazing satellite image created at NASA Goddard involved data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) that flies aboard NASA's Terra satellite. Because of its massive size, three MODIS images were combined to create an image of the storm system. The images were captured each time the Terra satellite passed over the U.S. on January 31 at 10:30 a.m., 12:05 p.m., and 1:45 p.m. Eastern Time (15:30, 17:05, and 18:45 UTC). The image clearly shows snow on the ground from Pennsylvania into the New England states, while the large area of clouds associated with the storm lie to the west. The image has a resolution of one kilometer per pixel.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. supplied infrared data of the storm system. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured infrared imagery of the storm on Jan. 31, 2011 at 18:47 UTC (1:47 p.m. EST). The image showed the early stages of a developing storm in the plains and Midwestern states and highlighted a preponderance of cold air in Canada and the northern U.S. that set the stage for the snowfall today.

A visible image created from AIRS data on Jan. 31 showed thickening clouds along a developing intense front in the plains and Midwestern states that will produce excessive snow, freezing rain, sleet, and wind in those areas today. The associated low pressure area guiding the storm will slide from Texas through the Mississippi Valley, Ohio Valley and then into New England.

NOAA's National Weather Service noted in their discussion today that this winter storm could easily be "one of the worst this season with blizzard conditions throughout much of the Midwest states, severe ice accretion from the middle Mississippi River valley eastward through parts of the Ohio Valley and into southern New England and heavy rain and severe thunderstorms over the deep south."

Nine states are under blizzard warnings today and Chicago is expecting two feet of snow by the evening commute and overnight. Residents of Oklahoma City are experiencing snow and gusty winds and expecting up to one and a half feet of snow today. On the southern end of this storm system, severe storms moved through Texas this morning, while areas from Birmingham to Memphis and Atlanta may also receive severe weather and between 1 and 2 inches of heavy rainfall as the system continues move east today.

The U.S. northeast is expecting snow, sleet and rain. Some northeastern U.S. cities have already recorded record snowfall and more is expected from this storm. Philadelphia has already recorded 37 inches of snow and New York City has received 56 inches. Philadelphia is expecting freezing rain today while New York City is forecast to receive between 3 and 6 inches of snow and sleet and between a quarter to 4 tenths of an inch of ice accumulation by late Wednesday.

As the system continues east, the National Weather Service is forecasting a large snowfall for New England. Boston is forecast to receive between 8 and 18 inches of snow and Portland, Maine, is expected to receive between 11 and 17 inches. It has already been a long winter in the U.S. northeast and today is the first day of February, a month known to be the snowiest of the season.

NASA Satellite Tracks Menacing Australian Cyclone

Fresh on the heels of a series of crippling floods that began in December 2010, and a small tropical cyclone, Anthony, this past weekend, the northeastern Australian state of Queensland is now bracing for what could become one of the largest tropical cyclones the state has ever seen.

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite, built and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., captured this infrared image of Yasi on Jan. 31, 2011, at 6:29 a.m. PST (9:29 a.m. EST). The AIRS data create an accurate 3-D map of atmospheric temperature, water vapor and clouds, data that are useful to forecasters. The image shows the temperature of Yasi's cloud tops or the surface of Earth in cloud-free regions. The coldest cloud-top temperatures appear in purple, indicating towering cold clouds and heavy precipitation. The infrared signal of AIRS does not penetrate through clouds. Where there are no clouds, AIRS reads the infrared signal from the surface of the ocean waters, revealing warmer temperatures in orange and red.

The AIRS image shows deep convective (thunderstorm) bands wrapping tighter into the low-level circulation center. Wrapping bands of thunderstorms indicate strengthening.

At the approximate time this image was taken, Yasi had maximum sustained winds near 90 knots (166 kilometers per hour, or 103 mph), equivalent to a Category Two hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. It was centered about 1,400 kilometers (875 miles) east of Cairns, Australia, moving west at about 19 knots per hour (35 kilometers per hour, or 22 mph). Cyclone-force winds extend out to 48 kilometers (30 miles) from the center.

Yasi is forecast to move west, then southwestward, into an area of low vertical wind shear (strong wind shear can weaken a storm). Forecasters at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center expect Yasi to continue to strengthen over the next 36 hours. The Center forecasts a landfall just south of Cairns as a large 100-plus knot-per-hour (185 kilometers per hour, or 115 mph) system by around midnight local time on Wednesday, Feb. 2.

NASA to Fly Into Hurricane Research This Summer

NASA to Fly Into Hurricane Research This Summer

PASADENA, Calif. – Three NASA aircraft will begin flights to study tropical cyclones on Aug. 15 during the agency's first major U.S.-based hurricane field campaign since 2001. The Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes mission, or GRIP, will study the creation and rapid intensification of hurricanes. Advanced instruments from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., will be aboard two of the aircraft.

One of the major challenges in tropical cyclone forecasting is knowing when a tropical cyclone is going to form. Scientists will use the data from this six-week field mission to better understand how tropical storms form and develop into major hurricanes. Mission scientists will also be looking at how storms strengthen, weaken and die.

"This is really going to be a game-changing hurricane experiment," said Ramesh Kakar, GRIP program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "For the first time, scientists will be able to study these storms and the conditions that produce them for up to 20 hours straight. GRIP will provide a sustained, continuous look at hurricane behavior at critical times during their formation and evolution."

GRIP is led by Kakar and three project scientists: Scott Braun and Gerry Heymsfield of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Edward Zipser of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Three NASA satellites will play a key role in supplying data about tropical cyclones during the field mission. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, or TRMM, managed by both NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, will provide rainfall estimates and help pinpoint the locations of "hot towers" or powerhouse thunderstorms in tropical cyclones. The CloudSat spacecraft, developed and managed by JPL, will provide cloud profiles of storms, which include altitude, temperatures and rainfall intensity. Several instruments onboard NASA's Aqua satellite, including JPL's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), will provide infrared, visible and microwave data that reveal such factors as temperature, air pressure, precipitation, cloud ice content, convection and sea surface temperatures.

The three NASA aircraft taking part in the mission are a DC-8, WB-57 and a remotely piloted Global Hawk. The DC-8 will fly out of the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida. The WB-57 will be based at the NASA Johnson Space Center's Ellington Field in Houston. The Global Hawk will be piloted and based from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, in Palmdale, Calif., while flying for up to 20 hours in the vicinity of hurricanes in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.

The aircraft will carry a total of 15 instruments, ranging from an advanced microwave sounder to dropsondes that take measurements as they fall through the atmosphere to the ocean surface. In order to determine how a tropical cyclone will behave, the instruments will analyze many factors including: cloud droplet and aerosol concentrations, air temperature, wind speed and direction in storms and on the ocean's surface, air pressure, humidity, lightning, aerosols, and water vapor. The data also will validate the observations from space.

The JPL instruments include the High-Altitude Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit Sounding Radiometer (HAMSR), flying aboard the Global Hawk; and the Airborne Precipitation Radar (APR-2), aboard the DC-8. HAMSR is a microwave atmospheric sounder that will be used to infer the 3-D distribution of temperature, water vapor and cloud liquid water in the atmosphere. It operates even in the presence of clouds. APR-2 is a dual-frequency weather radar that will take 3-D images of the precipitation beneath the DC-8 to measure its characteristics. These data will be used to infer rainfall rates, the location of ice and the speed of air updrafts, all of which are part of the atmospheric processes that provide a hurricane's energy.
"It was a lot of hard work to assemble the science team and the payload for the three aircraft for GRIP," Kakar said. "But now that the start of the field experiment is almost here, we can hardly contain our excitement."

In addition to JPL, several other NASA field centers are involved in the mission, including Goddard; Johnson; Dryden; the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.; Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.; and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Centers provide
scientists, instrument teams, project management or aircraft operations.

GRIP mission planning is being coordinated with two separate hurricane airborne research campaigns that will be in the field at the same time. The National Science Foundation is sponsoring the PRE-Depression Investigation of Cloud-systems in the Tropics mission. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is conducting the Intensity Forecast Experiment 2010. These flights will be based in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands and Tampa, Fla.