Satellite reveals clouds as never seen before

[FLO]

This ones for Kain (and us closet cloud fans ):

The CloudSat spacecraft has begun its scientific mission by returning the first ever top-to-bottom profiles of clouds. The images give researchers a simultaneous glimpse of both the clouds themselves and their precipitation.

"We're seeing the atmosphere as we've never seen it before," says Deborah Vane, CloudSat deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US. "We're no longer looking at clouds like images on a flat piece of paper, but instead we're peering into the clouds and seeing their layered complexity."

CloudSat launched on 28 April on a Delta 2 rocket along with the aerosol-monitoring CALIPSO satellite. CloudSat's Cloud Profiling Radar, the first millimetre-wavelength radar, underwent tests in late May and was formally activated on 2 June.

"All major cloud system types were observed, and the radar demonstrated its ability to penetrate through almost all but the heaviest rainfall," says Graeme Stephens, CloudSat principal investigator and atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University, US.

Storm front

The first image is a cross-section of a warm storm front above the Norwegian Sea taken on 20 May. In the image, red represents highly reflective particles such as raindrops, ice crystals or snowflakes. Blue represents thinner cirrus clouds.

The radar also provided a look at a night snow storm near Antarctica. The long winter nights make traditional remote sensing difficult in the polar regions and CloudSat is the first satellite able to detect snowfall from space.

A third image shows tall thunderstorm clouds over east Africa.

The results are still preliminary, but the mission team aims to release validated science data within nine months.

CloudSat is part of the A-Train, a constellation of five satellites that fly right behind one another, measuring the same swath of Earth.

Source: New Scientist

http://tinyurl.com/en8sl

[Kain]

I have heard quite about this project, Hopefully it will aid in understanding Hurricanes more..

Would love to see inside a thunderstorm

Cheers for posting this up Steve

Kain

[iancandler]

If they can up the resolution on that a little its going to be a realy useful tool in helping work out the rest of the mystery surrounding torando genesis..