During one flight, pilot Stu Broce took this photograph of the overshooting top of a storm over North Carolina. For perspective, the storm was about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters) tall, while the ER-2 cruised at an altitude of 65,000 feet (20,000 meters). (Commercial airliners usually fly at about 30,000 feet or 9,000 meters.) Overshooting tops are dome-like protrusions at the top of thunderstorms that provide evidence of very strong updrafts. Severe storms tend to have larger and longer-lived overshooting tops than less intense storms.
The ER-2 flight was part of the Integrated Precipitation and Hydrology Experiment (IPHEx), a field campaign designed to improve understanding of precipitation over mountainous terrain. IPHEx was one part of an ongoing, broad effort to validate and calibrate observations from the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, an international program led by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
During the six-week campaign over the southern Appalachian mountains, NASA and partners at Duke University and NOAA’s Hydrometeorological Test Bed set up ground stations with rain gauges and ground radar. They also collected data from satellites and two aircraft. When the ER-2 finally returned to NASA Armstrong Flight Research facility in California, it had flown 18 IPHEx science missions totaling more than 95 flight hours.
References and Related Reading
- Duke University Integrated Precipitation and Hydrology Experiment. Accessed August 22, 2014.
- Duke University (2014, April 28) IPHEx Science Plan. Accessed August 22, 2014.
- NASA (2014, August 13) Three Radars are Better than One: Field Campaign Demonstrates Two New Instruments. Accessed August 22, 2014.
- NASA (2014, June 18) NASA Aircraft Concludes Six-Week Ground Validation and Hydrology Campaign. Accessed August 22, 2014.
- NASA Precipitation Measurement Missions IPHEx Field Campaign. Accessed August 22, 2014.
- NASA Earth Observatory (2012, May 26) The Anatomy of a Thunderstorm. Accessed August 22, 2014.
- National Weather Service (2014, May) May 23, 2014 Extreme Hail Event. Accessed August 22, 2014.
- National Weather Service - Eastern Region, HQ (2014, May 25) May 23, 2014 Extreme Hail Event. Accessed August 22, 2014.
- StormSite (2014, May) Hail Reports. Accessed August 22, 2014.
Photograph courtesy of Stu Broce and the Integrated Precipitation and Hydrology Experiment
team. Caption by Adam Voiland, with information from releases by Beth
Hagenauer and Ellen Gray.
- Instrument(s):
- Photograph - NASA