OLYMPEX Wrap Up

Narration:

Transcript:

[NATURAL SOUND] Houze: The weather has been extremely robust and informative. We’ve had good forecasting of the weather so we can plan our campaign. Petersen: I’m fairly confident that the OLYMPEX field campaign is one of the best that we’ve done yet, bar none. It was a very nice way to finish off our major ground validation field campaigns for GPM and that we really just nailed it with OLYMPEX. Houze: As you know, the Olympic Mountains are really the only temperate rainforest area in the Northern Hemisphere, and we get lots, lots of storms every winter, and I think the excitement is that we’ve gotten such a good sequence of weather patterns with very heavy rain storms. We’ve had several flooding events, we have one radar that’s perched by the side of the Quinault River. In fact it became so high at one point that they had to literally raise the radar and its truck that it sits on up several feet and the radar operators ended up having to kayak to the radar. Petersen: The storm that I really got excited about is a storm where we did our very first-ever triple-aircraft stacked sampling underneath the GPM Core satellite as it flew over the top. While at the same time we were looking up at the precipitation from below the base of the mountains with three different radars. The system itself was a very complex precipitation. The flow was coming in off the ocean then impinging on the mountains, and then the precipitation got very deep over the mountains, whereas it was much shallower over the ocean. And so we were able to see this ice process over the mountains that wasn’t quite as pronounced as over the ocean, so there’s a big transition in how the precipitation and the rainfall was made in just those two areas over a very short distance. The dataset that we’ve collected so far is—there’s no question—it’s going to really contribute to our being able to understand both the precipitation processes that are occurring but also how we do a better job at measuring those processes from space. [MUSIC]