April Fool's Day Snow Storm

  • Released Monday, April 10th, 2017
  • Updated Wednesday, November 15th, 2023 at 12:10AM
  • ID: 4570

This visualization starts over the United States as the viewer watches a weather event form over the east coast. We then freeze on April 1, 2017 as GPM flies overhead collecting data over this weather system. Zooming down to the Northeast, GPM's DPR (3D volumetric precipitation data) is slowly cut away to reveal the inner precipitation structure of the snow storm. Looking closely, one can see a thin band of liquid precipitation that formed in the northern section of the storm eventually tapering into frozen precipitation in the far north. The visualization wraps with the camera pulling back to a bird's eye view of the snow storm.

NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core observatory satellite flew over the United States northeast coast during a snow storm on April 1, 2017. This snow storm delivered up to 18 inches of snow in some parts of New England.

The GPM Core Observatory carries two instruments that show the location and intensity of rain and snow, which defines a crucial part of the storm structure – and how it will behave. The GPM Microwave Imager sees through the tops of clouds to observe how much and where precipitation occurs, and the Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar observes precise details of precipitation in 3-dimensions.

GPM data is part of the toolbox of satellite data used by forecasters and scientists to understand how storms behave. GPM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Current and future data sets are available with free registration to users from NASA Goddard's Precipitation Processing Center website.

Color bar for frozen precipitation rates (ie, snow rates). Shades of cyan represent low amounts of frozen precipitation, whereas shades of purple represent high amounts of precipitation.

Color bar for frozen precipitation rates (ie, snow rates). Shades of cyan represent low amounts of frozen precipitation, whereas shades of purple represent high amounts of precipitation.

Color bar for liquid precipitation rates (ie, rain rates). Shades of green represent low amounts of liquid precipitation, whereas shades of red represent high amounts of precipitation.

Color bar for liquid precipitation rates (ie, rain rates). Shades of green represent low amounts of liquid precipitation, whereas shades of red represent high amounts of precipitation.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio Data provided by the joint NASA/JAXA GPM mission.

Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Datasets used in this visualization

  • GPM Rain Rates (Surface Precipitation)

    ID: 822
    Collected with GMI 4/1/2017 5:15:48 - 6:48:22Z

    Credit: Data provided by the joint NASA/JAXA GPM mission.

    See all pages that use this dataset

  • GPM Volumetric Precipitation data (Ku)

    ID: 830
    Observed Data Collected with DPR JAXA 4/1/2017 5:15:48 - 6:48:22Z

    Credit: Data provided by the joint NASA/JAXA GPM mission.

    See all pages that use this dataset

Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.