Cloud Imagers Offer New Details on Earth's Health

Until recently, NASA's study of atmospheric aerosols and cloud particles has been focused primarily on satellite images, which, while granting large-scale atmospheric analysis, limited scientists' ability to acquire detailed information about individual particles. Now, experiments with specialized equipment can be flown on standard jets, making it possible for researchers to monitor and more accurately anticipate changes in Earth's atmosphere and weather patterns.

Transcript

00:00:01 people have always looked at the heavens for inspiration but a small firm in Boulder Colorado looks at the skies in a different way for over 25 years Stratton Park engineering company or spec Incorporated has been creating Innovative instrumentation to help collect and validate atmospheric research data the best way to in the long term to

00:00:27 determine climate changes from satellite data because the satellites are always spinning around the earth and collecting data continuously but they need some kind of a reference and what we call Ground truth so our instruments were up in the clouds measuring the shapes and sizes of ice crystals and Cloud particles or CPI was developed jointly under small

00:00:50 business Innovation research or sbir awards from NASA Langley Research Center and the National Science Foundation as aircraft fly through the same clouds that are being imaged by satellites the CPI takes high-speed digital pictures of the minute Crystal particles that move through its probe and Records them on a computer hard drive the characteristics of the particles can

00:01:17 determine whether sunlight gets through the clouds and warms the Earth's surface or if it bounces off and cools the Earth the CPI has been installed on aircraft all around the world including NASA's wb57 specs 2D stereo probe known as 2DS uses laser beams to capture two-dimensional images of cloud particles 2DS has also flown on a number of Major

00:01:43 Field campaigns by NASA and the National Science Foundation for Hurricane and Cloud studies another instrument developed with sbir funding from Goddard space flight center sends a laser pulse out and looks at photons as they are scattered by Cloud particles Spec's nc2 lidar will play a crucial role towards validating NASA satellite

00:02:06 data the instrument measures Cloud properties out to almost a kilometer from the aircraft now the reason this is important is that satellites that look down at Clouds typically have a pixel size of about a kilometer so they don't see the individual particles or even what's going on inside of this kilometer pixel so what we do now is we measure

00:02:29 the properties of the entire kilometer we get average properties the company is now developing extremely small instruments that can image Cloud particles continuously for up to 30 hours this makes them suitable to fly on unmanned aerial vehicles or uavs uavs can gather data from places where typical manned aircraft can't fly and

00:02:52 many scientists see these aircraft playing a large role in the future of atmospheric research we are developing a sensor under the NASA Wallops sbir program to be installed on very small uavs we call this a micro CPI and again like the CPI it measures the properties of ice crystals and water droplets records the data on board the small UAV and also

00:03:19 telemeters it back to users on the ground Spec's ultimate goal is to help researchers better understand what's going on inside the clouds and improve predictions of the earth's climate and understanding that benefits us all