NURTURE
North American Upstream Feature-Resolving and Tropopause Uncertainty Reconnaissance Experiment
Overview
The North American Upstream Feature-Resolving and Tropopause Uncertainty Reconnaissance Experiment (NURTURE) is a NASA-funded large-scale aircraft field campaign.
- It will advance knowledge of the processes that lead to extreme high-impact weather (HIW) events during the winter, such as severe cold air outbreaks, windstorms and hazardous seas, snow and ice storms, sea ice breakup, and extreme precipitation.
- HIW events have significant socioeconomic costs and threaten national security (e.g., destabilizing supply chains and damaging infrastructure).
NURTURE is officially endorsed by the World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Under the Polar Coupled Analysis and Prediction for Services (PCAPS) goals of the WWRP, activities will explore the limits of predictability on different spatial and temporal scales and parameters in the atmosphere–cryosphere–ocean system, and connections between polar and lower latitudes. Under the Predictability, Dynamics, and Ensemble Forecasting (PDEF) goals of the WWRP, NURTURE will target the mesoscale potential vorticity (PV) anomalies associated with tropopause polar vortices (TPVs) in the upper-troposphere and lower-stratosphere (UTLS) and related diabatic processes that may have a strong influence over the downstream predictability of high-impact weather phenomena.
NURTURE’s activities will advance dynamical meteorology and predictability research and promote the quantification of forecast uncertainty.
Scientific Objectives
The overarching goal of NURTURE is to quantify the impact that perturbations poleward of the jet stream have on jet stream variability and high-impact weather (HIW) events.
The Science Objectives are to advance the knowledge of:
- Processes that control upstream perturbations to the jet stream, such as tropopause polar vortices (TPVs), dry air intrusions, turbulence, and interactions with jet stream
- Upper tropospheric and lower stratospheric influences on tropopause and the jet stream
- Boundary-layer processes that facilitate communication between the troposphere and surface and that precondition the environment for High Impact Weather (HIW) events
NURTURE will emphasize the life cycles of mesoscale and synoptic-scale disturbances of Arctic origin and how their juxtaposition with mid-latitude features creates high-impact weather. It will also target measurements needed to reduce systematic process errors in numerical models within the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS) and maritime tropospheric regions in the vicinity of features responsible for HIW. The findings of NURTURE will be instrumental in improving the accuracy of numerical weather models and predicting high-impact weather events, thereby enhancing our ability to prepare for and respond to such events.
Observational Approach
NURTURE features NASA’s Gulfstream-III aircraft during Phase 1 in 2026 and adds NASA’s Boeing 777 during Phase 2 in 2027. Phase 2 will serve as the NASA 777’s inaugural science mission since joining the agency’s fleet of aircraft.
Each phase of airborne campaigns lasts four to six weeks and targets atmospheric conditions that develop and intensify with the potential to lead to HIW. Base operations will attempt to be located poleward of the climatological January through February jet stream, with a very long sample range.
A major benefit of NURTURE will be NASA’s ability to gather hemisphere-wide observations. The winter 2026 Phase 1 of NURTURE is a collaboration with NASA and large-scale aircraft field campaigns based in Biloxi (USA) and Shannon (Ireland), which occurred during the same timeframe. In 2027, Phase 2, with the addition of the NASA 777, will have an increased range of 2700 nautical miles (5000 km). Detailed atmospheric observations will be collected from Europe, Greenland, the entire North Atlantic Ocean, all of Canada, most of the United States, and much of the Arctic Ocean.
