Earth ID: 12489

SnowEx Field Campaign: B-roll From The P-3 Orion Aircraft

Released on February 14, 2017

SnowEx is a NASA led multi-year research campaign to improve measurements of how much snow is on the ground at any given time and how much liquid water is contained in that snow.

Five aircraft with a total of ten different sensors will participate in the SnowEx campaign. From a base of operations at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado Springs, SnowEx will deploy a P-3 Orion aircraft operated by the Scientific Development Squadron ONE (VXS-1), based at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland. A King Air plane will fly out of Grand Junction, Colorado, while high-altitude NASA jets will fly from Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The planes will carry passive and active microwave sensors that are good at measuring snow-water equivalent in dry snow, but are less optimal for measuring snow forests or light snow cover. The campaign will also deploy an airborne laser instrument to measure snow depth, and airborne sensors to measure surface temperature and reflected light from snow.

Data acquired from the SnowEx campaign will be stored at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, and will be available to anyone to order at no cost, as is the case with all NASA data.

For more information: https://www.nasa.gov/earthexpeditions