So our primary mission here is
satellite validation.
So we just launched this next generation system and in order
to validate its performance independently we've got our
aircraft sensor with well calibrated instruments and we
use that to give us high confidence--we're flying very
high in the atmosphere--and it gives us very good comparisons to what
the satellite is seeing.
Today we're doing a mission, uh....wheels up...from Warner Robins
Georgia...Air Force Base at seventeen hundred...
...we do have another long wave trough beginning to approach the
West Coast later in the period by day 7, indicating that the
wave train is back.
So, the "go, no-go" decision is 100% dependent, of course, from
day to day on each mission.
Today, the reason we decided on a "go" is because we're in
Huntsville and we have a very long loiter time over this
location.
And we have an "LMA" and a pretty intense instrument
network here.
Even though the case itself is not great--we're not expecting a
ton of lightning with these systems-- we can still get some
really good data out of it.
So it looks like the mission's a go.
Any instrument teams have any...questions?
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We've coordinated ABI, special scans, 30 second imagery, uh, 17
Zulu to 2230 Zulu today.
We're getting a little bit of what's called potential energy--we call it
convective potential energy, and it's helping fire up these
storms.
And so this is what the models were kind of picking up on
earlier.
We call it convective initiation.
That's what today's mission is really geared toward.
Yeah, yeah, so I got the satellite, the visible, and then
I got CPL...
The GLM--the Geostationary Lightning Mapper--is an optical
instrument and we have virtually no other optical measurement to
corroborate what the GLM is seeing except for an instrument
that we've developed for the airplane.
So we're looking down on cloud top at lightning.
Some things that we've shown is that if you're able to
incorporate lightning into a forecasting environment we can
do things like increase lead time before severe weather hits,
decrease false alarm rates we're able to forecast severe weather
a lot better, which of course means time and, maybe more
importantly, saving lives.
So we don't know where the lightning originated.
So the GLM gives us where the flashes are beginning, where
they're propagating, and then with the ground based you can
tell where they went to ground,
so if you're, say, at an airport, baggage handling,
fueling, you're outdoors, you may not realize you have a
non-zero risk above you of the lightning propagating overhead
or coming from some distance away, and so the GLM can help us
depict that and improve your situational awareness.
(off mic voices)
The data coming from this system is just phenomenal.
We're seeing data at three times the data rate, double the
resolution typically, and it's just meteorologically, we're
seeing features that we have never, necessarily, noticed
before from the longer lag data from the previous satellite
systems.
The advantage of having a high altitude aircraft is that we can
make, as best we can, a measurement that mimics what the
satellite is seeing.
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We're at seventy thousand feet, your typical
airliner is down around thirty-five thousand feet.
If we sit here on the ground and we see an airliner way up high
making a contrail, we look down from the U2 almost from the same
distance and see that airliner well below us making contrails
So we're twice as high as an airliner.
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So what this is going to enable people to do is see
mesoscale features that we really didn't have a good handle
on.
And that's why having the aircraft in place, it allows us
to get deeper insights into this phenomenology that's kind of new
to us because we've never been able to stare at the Earth with
this kind of resolution.
(jet engine)
Pogo clear!
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Flying really high in the stratosphere, at twenty
kilometers--what that enables us to do is overfly a target of
interest and match the view geometry of the satellite and
that gives us very high confidence that we're collecting
what the satellite is seeing.
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