[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 in saying 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 the 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
have gotten such a good sequence of weather patterns with
very heavy rain storms. We've had several flooding events,
we have one radar which is 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 was 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 system. The flow was coming in off the ocean and 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 over the ocean so there's a big
transition in how the precipitation and the rainfall was made between just those two areas over a
short distance. The dataset that we've collected so far--there's no question--
it's going to really contribute to being able to understand both the precipitation
processes that are occurring, but how we do a better job of measuring those processes from
space. [MUSIC]