Snowd Under

[cmichweather]

Well Baroclinic has talked me into starting a thread to get the information out about our field campaign that began operations this week it is called Snowd Under (Student Nowcasting & Observations with the DOW University of North Dakota Education through Research) Basically this is a completely student run field campaign designed and run by the PhD and MS students at the University of North Dakota. Not to sell the undergraduates short, they are helping in all phases of the field campaign and are essential to the operation of the project.

The purpose of the field campaign is to study winter time precipitation events (if they occur), along with radiation and atmospheric aerosols. The project has at its disposal one of the DOW radar trucks which has been practicing deployments this week, for possible winter time precipitation events. Along with the DOW radar, UND has its own polarimetric radar name North-Pol which will be run during precipitation events, and the KGFK radar located in Mayville to help us with triple doppler analysis of the wind fields and precipitation fields.

Along with the radar analysis occuring we have UND's Citation aircraft, which is our atmospheric research plane that has been all around the world doing atmospheric sampling for numerous field campaigns. The aircraft will the operating with a goal to collect atmospheric aerosol data during precipitation events along with studies of the preferred snow crystal growth regions, concentrations of snow crystals and snowflake photography.

We also have a surface observation team that will be trying to collect some high resolution measurements of the snowfall data in our operational domain. We have numerous snowboard crews trained and prepared to measure total snowfall in numerous locations during a precipitation event. A unique aspect of this project is that 18 (i think its something like this not to sure though) K-12 schools will also be participating in snowfall measurements, and have all been trained on how to do this. Hopefully this will provide accurate and high resolution data to see how much variation in snow depth can be observed in such a small area, combining this with our own snow measuring crews we should get some great surface snowfall measurements.

Sort of a brief summary of the project and just thought i'd share it with you guys.

You can follow our daily forecast briefings, along with updates on deployment and photos of what is occuring at either

http://snowdunder.blogspot.com/

http://www.facebook.com/snowdunder

I'll link our locally run wrf but its tough to deal with as it is on a constant loop and can't be stopped. If you want to see the output click on select function>view/make forecast if you'd like to see our locally run wrf which runs out to 192 hours for the CONUS view at 0 and 12z and the zoomed in regional view run out to 24 hrs at the normal 6 hr durations (0z, 6z....) The link takes you to a sort of spc like meso analysis and you need to look at the forecast to view our models.

http://stwrc.und.edu/snowdundr/index.html#

[baroclinic_instability]

Awesome stuff, wish we did something like this when I was at UND! Thanks for the more in-depth information. I really think this first storm will be a good one to analyze. It seems likely there will be some interesting snow gradients that pop up.

[cmichweather]

Awesome stuff, wish we did something like this when I was at UND! Thanks for the more in-depth information. I really think this first storm will be a good one to analyze. It seems likely there will be some interesting snow gradients that pop up.

Ya the only problem with this storm is its on a weekend so we don't have the k-12 surface measurements, and the citation can only fly during the day. I'm not sure if the citation will take off early sunday morning when the sun comes up due to surface conditions along with getting everyone ready to deploy that early, but it seems like its a good test run for us hopefully we can get another event using all phases of the research team involved for a long duration of the event.

[baroclinic_instability]

Ya the only problem with this storm is its on a weekend so we don't have the k-12 surface measurements, and the citation can only fly during the day. I'm not sure if the citation will take off early sunday morning when the sun comes up due to surface conditions along with getting everyone ready to deploy that early, but it seems like its a good test run for us hopefully we can get another event using all phases of the research team involved for a long duration of the event.

Is there a time limit on the project or is it all winter season long? It is ND, you will have plenty of interesting events no doubt. Clipper season will be fun.

[cmichweather]

Is there a time limit on the project or is it all winter season long? It is ND, you will have plenty of interesting events no doubt. Clipper season will be fun.

No i wish it was, i think we have 20 something operational days i think we end sometime in december like december 10th or so. That would have been awesome to go ll winter and to get our research plane up in the clippers test out the snow growth regions, see how the snow ratios pan out and everything, hopefully we'll get one.

[baroclinic_instability]

Any good data with the last couple snow events?

[turtlehurricane]

Sounds like an awesome project, I wish you guys the best of luck up there at UND.

[cmichweather]

I went home for thanksgiving so i missed the last event, but from working the radar while i was there, i know we have well over 20 hours of radar data from the snow events. I know we've seen some gravity waves, and some pretty awesome banding structure during the events and i saw some of the research planes images of the different growth structures at different heights in the cloud really interesting to see the transition over some small areas from capped columns to plates to aggregates. It'd be nice if this next storm can produce some more extreme banding over our area during the daylight hours. The DOW team has seen some pretty amazing things so far here's some video of some PPI scans at 1.3 degrees.