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Joe: The weather here is very unique in that we have all these different types of precipitation

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occurring in the same spot and the underlying factor behind all of it is

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rain, rain, rain. It's one storm system after another comes in from the

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coast, and the rainfall just piles up.
Patrick: Really what we're looking at here

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are these big midlatitude frontal systems that make landfall

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onto the Olympic Peninsula and how these systems kind of go

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from the ocean onto the land and hit the mountains and start really

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growing vertically and where some really intense convection

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and rainfall can occur. So ground validation basically helps us understand

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how well the satellite is seeing precipitation.
Patrick: So what we're trying

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to do with GPM is kind of build a three dimensional view of

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precipitating clouds. And so in order to do that we need

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measurements that are directly on the ground and then we need measurements

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of the cloud and then measurements kind of looking from different perspectives of the cloud.

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David: NASA will be providing two aircraft, the DC-8,

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which will be flying at mid-levels, 39,000 feet or so, and

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then the ER-2 aircraft, which flies much higher above the clouds.

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On the ground the main assets are the NASA Polarmetric Radar, is where

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we are now, along with the D3R radar, which is a dual-frequency, dual-

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polarization radar that has the same frequencies as the GPM satellite

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Well we're quite remote, which is fine, but he hardest part actually

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for my group was to acquire land on the Quinault Indian

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Nation Territory. There was a lot of--we needed to make sure we

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were doing the right thing environmentally, get all the right permits. We worked very closely with the

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Quinault Indian Nation, they were wonderful. Then once we got all the regular permits,

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we had to then kind of cap the top of the mountain to support our radar

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which requires about 1500 pounds per square foot for it to be set on

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stable.
Patrick: some of my colleauges

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actually had to hike in and put instruments in or go maintain instruments

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you know, 14-mile journeys into the woods basically. It's really neat

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to get to work in such a unique environment like that

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where you can actually put these instruments in places where there's never been measurements

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like that before.
Matt: You know we have sites all the way on the

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coast, they're going to see probably 6 inches of rain for the season. We're going to have some

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sites that are going to be up in the mountains that are going to see a couple of feet of rain for

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the season, and we also have instruments sitting around 5000 feet that are going to see probably

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a few feet of snow. So we're going to see quite a breadth of precipitation for

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this project.
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