WMOD00176

• Project Name: Annual Report
• Title: Seeding Operations & Atmospheric Research, 2005 Annual Report
• Prepared By: Duncan Axisia
• Date: 12/31/2005
• Weather Modification - Doc Type: Report

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precipitation estimates are generated every 5
minutes and are accumulated from hours to
days to months.

In-situ (in-cloud) measurements

Aircraft in-situ measurements in and around
clouds with a state-of-the-art cloud physics
aircraft provide an immense amount of data
within the micro scale environment of cloud
structures. The high sampling frequencies of
the most modern airborne instrumentation
available and the fast speed of the flying
aircraft laboratory provide for a
comprehensively detailed data set of the cloud
microphysical structure and as it is modified by
the surrounding environment through time. In
the absence of clouds of sufficient depth, radar
and satellite can provide little data on the
atmospheric environment. Cloud physics
aircraft can actually "touch" the atmospheric
moisture as cloud droplet spectrometers, liquid
water content sensors and
temperature/dewpoint probes measure several
variable properties in and around clouds on the
mountains and on the plains with no major
limitations on the vertical and aerial extent of
the measurements other than the terrain and
the service ceiling of the aircraft. In-situ
observations from aircraft are indispensable for
documenting the composition of clouds and
providing data for the diagnosis of the
processes within them.

SOAR now has the capability to use such
instrumentation. These instruments could be
used to "look" for a seeding effect (or lack of) in
clouds in real time as they occur. Such
documentation of seeding effect in the SOAR
target area already exists and is documented
in a paper by Woodley et. al. (2005) presented
at the 16th Conference on Advertent and
Inadvertent Weather Modification.