Within 25 minutes, the weather balloon released Tuesday afternoon from Sleeping Giant School reached 30,000 feet, the common cruising altitude of airplanes, where the temperature was 54 F below zero.
The balloon rising at 4 meters per second transmitted weather data to an instrument station in the school parking lot as the sensor reached into the stratosphere.
The weather balloon — or technically a balloon radiosonde that measures the temperature, relative humidity and winds in the atmospheric profile — was one of 12 released in the past two weeks targeting snowfall in Routt County. The releases collect data in the troposphere atmospheric layer that is intended to improve snowfall weather forecasting models for mountainous terrain, said Claire Pettersen. Ph.D., a principal investigator on the project and assistant professor at University of Michigan.
The scientific work is part of efforts by dozens of students and professors from seven educational institutions in a three-year, $4.8 million study funded by the National Science Foundation. The ongoing field study in Routt County is called Snow Sensitivity to Clouds in a Mountain Environment, or S2noCliME for short. The overall goal of the scientific study is to better understand cold-season cloud and precipitation processes in a mountainous environment.
The project aims to improve forecasts of snowfall and estimates of how climate change will impact snowpack and water availability in the western U.S. mountains, according to the NSF. Data collection will continue until April from three temporary scientific stations located at Sleeping Giant School, Yampa Valley Regional Airport and near Bar-UE lift at Steamboat Resort.
“Forecasters do an awesome job, but this is a really hard physics problem,” Pettersen said of forecasting in mountainous terrain. “Small modifications when you are in a cold, dry environment can result in very different snowfall processes. Understanding the physics better will allow the National Weather Service models to converge to more realistic forecasts.”
The team is studying how storms can strengthen or weaken as they move through the region and investigating cloud and ice particles during snowstorms. The study data is on display online in a “field catalog” at https://catalog.eol.ucar.edu/s2noclime. The data is being utilized by weather forecasters, meteorologists and partnering agencies ranging from the National Weather Service to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.
“We hope that our catalog will ultimately improve winter storm forecasts and tell Western cities when to expect a drought because of insufficient snowpack,” Pettersen explained.
Gannet Hallar, Ph.D., longtime director of Storm Peak Laboratory at the top of Mount Werner and a professor of atmospheric sciences at University of Utah, is part of the research team. The scientists note that Storm Peak Lab is an essential piece of the field campaign because it hosts a variety of instruments that are sampling the cloud and snow on the mountain. Now those lab measurements will be coupled with observations from the radars at Sleeping Giant School and the airport to better understand snow production.
“This campaign gives us a rare opportunity to integrate specialized radars, balloon measurements, surface instrumentation and more into one cohesive study of snowfall formation processes over mountains,” Hallar explained. “The impacts of declining snowpack are far-reaching for the economy and the way of life in the West. This combined data will help advance our models and predictive capabilities.”
The study is conducted by a team of experts in snowfall properties and processes, mountain meteorology, cloud microphysics, cloud-aerosol interactions and water vapor transport. Researchers and graduate students from several universities will visit Routt County throughout the winter to work on the project and teach related lessons to elementary students, Hallar said.
Younger students will receive a special edition Snow Science coloring book that teaches about such topics as types of clouds, weather instruments and radar, snowflake structures and Storm Peak Lab. For example, the students will learn about “riming,” or the process when super-cooled water droplets freeze onto snowflakes that become heavier and fall faster.
The professors said they appreciate the support of the Steamboat Springs School District in allowing the placement of a temporary research station outside the school west of Steamboat Springs with its good line of sight to the partnering Storm Peak Lab some 7 linear kilometers away.
“The U.S. Mountain West is becoming warmer and more arid and has seen declines in snowpack, low-elevation snow cover and increased occurrence of rain-on-snow events,” the project summary explained. “Projections of precipitation in mountain regions do not exhibit cohesive trends. Significant variability in the frequency and intensity of extreme events, the phase of precipitation, varying degrees of orographic enhancement, as well as complex cloud microphysical and aerosol impacts on precipitation properties cause projections of future precipitation in mountain regions to be highly variable.”
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