[music]
Joe: The weather here is very unique in that we have all these different types of precipitation
occurring in the same spot and the underlying factor behind all of it is
rain, rain, rain. It's one storm system after another comes in from the
coast, and the rainfall just piles up. Patrick: Really what we're looking at here
are these big midlatitude frontal systems that make landfall
onto the Olympic Peninsula and how these systems kind of go
from the ocean onto the land and hit the mountains and start really
growing vertically and where some really intense convection
and rainfall can occur. So ground validation basically helps us understand
how well the satellite is seeing precipitation. Patrick: So what we're trying
to do with GPM is kind of build a three dimensional view of
precipitating clouds. And so in order to do that we need
measurements that are directly on the ground and then we need measurements
of the cloud and then measurements kind of looking from different perspectives of the cloud.
David: NASA will be providing two aircraft, the DC-8,
which will be flying at mid-levels, 39,000 feet or so, and
then the ER-2 aircraft, which flies much higher above the clouds.
On the ground the main assets are the NASA Polarmetric Radar, is where
we are now, along with the D3R radar, which is a dual-frequency, dual-
polarization radar that has the same frequencies as the GPM satellite
Well we're quite remote, which is fine, but he hardest part actually
for my group was to acquire land on the Quinault Indian
Nation Territory. There was a lot of--we needed to make sure we
were doing the right thing environmentally, get all the right permits. We worked very closely with the
Quinault Indian Nation, they were wonderful. Then once we got all the regular permits,
we had to then kind of cap the top of the mountain to support our radar
which requires about 1500 pounds per square foot for it to be set on
stable. Patrick: some of my colleauges
actually had to hike in and put instruments in or go maintain instruments
you know, 14-mile journeys into the woods basically. It's really neat
to get to work in such a unique environment like that
where you can actually put these instruments in places where there's never been measurements
like that before. Matt: You know we have sites all the way on the
coast, they're going to see probably 6 inches of rain for the season. We're going to have some
sites that are going to be up in the mountains that are going to see a couple of feet of rain for
the season, and we also have instruments sitting around 5000 feet that are going to see probably
a few feet of snow. So we're going to see quite a breadth of precipitation for
this project. [music]