Scientists Sky-High Over First CloudSat Images
Last month we wrote about the launch of the CloudSat and Calipso satellites. Now reports are coming back that the first images from Cloudsat are giving scientists a completely new view of the clouds:
"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’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.
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.
The picture above is "CloudSat’s first image, of a warm front storm over the Norwegian Sea, was obtained on May 20, 2006. In this horizontal cross-section of clouds, warm air is seen rising over colder air as the satellite travels from right to left. The red colors are indicative of highly reflective particles such as water droplets (or rain) or larger ice crystals (or snow), while the blue indicates thinner clouds (such as cirrus). The flat green/blue lines across the bottom represent the ground signal. The vertical scale on the CloudSat Cloud Profiling Radar image is approximately 30 kilometers (19 miles). The blue line below the Cloud Profiling Radar image indicates that the data were taken over water."
For more information on Cloudsat, visit the NASA CloudSat website.
