Notes from the Field

In early September, I drove down to Wallops Flight Facility to set up our GPS base station in preparation for the test flight. The test flight is to verify that everything is working as expected, and to do some calibration, since the C-130 is a new platform for the Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor (LVIS). LVIS […]

Editor’s note: In fall 2013, researchers aboard a NASA C-130 traveled to Greenland to study changes in the ice sheet and sea ice following the summer melt season. Other airborne campaigns, like NASA’s Operation IceBridge, study changes on an annual basis and this is the first large-scale airborne survey of seasonal change. The C-130, equipped […]

A successful field campaign collecting meteorological and hydrological data almost always involves a forecasting element. A detailed high quality forecast briefing on the potential evolution of weather events allows the scientists behind the scenes and out in the field to make crucial decisions that ultimately may determine the success of a project. While many joke […]

As an undergraduate (from February 2008 to May 2009), I worked for Dan Ceynar, the engineer who coordinates the instrumentation networks for the Iowa Flood Center, and a large part of my job then and since returning to the Iowa Flood Center last October has been taking care of our rain gauges in the field. […]

Vijay Mishra and I went to do a maintenance check yesterday on one of the 4 X-band radars that the University of Iowa is contributing to the IFloodS field campaign. Below is a photo of the radar, located at a topographical high point near Elkader, Iowa. The X-band radar has a panoramic view of part […]

Although the significant convection stayed well south of the IFloodS area of study on the evening of 28 May, the multiple wavelength radars at the NPOL site captured the large anvil spreading out from the convection and the associated undulations beneath, known as mammatus. Mammatus clouds are often (but not necessarily) associated with severe weather […]

When I heard that student volunteers were needed for IFloodS, I knew I wanted to take part. I had had little experience with fieldwork in the past. Most of my graduate work has been spent in front of a computer, conducting data analysis and performing hydrological modeling. I had difficulty visualizing the information I was […]

Finding a location for two of the four University of Iowa XPOL radars was easy. They will remain at their current home base locations near Iowa City and Cedar Rapids overlooking the Clear Creek Watershed for the IFloodS campaign.  For the other two destined for the Turkey River basin in northeast Iowa — well, there […]

Last year, when working with the NASA GPM team in the planning stages for the Iowa Flood Studies project, more affectionately known as IFloodS, I worried — a lot. 2012 was a year of historic drought in Iowa. IFloodS is all about studying and measuring precipitation. What if drought continued into 2013? In short, what […]