NDTE

The primary goals of the North Dakota Tracer Experiment are to understand how thunderstorms produce hailstones and to devise improved seeding strategies to suppress hail formation. One of the most difficult problems in cloud seeding operations is that very little is usually known about where silver iodide seeding aerosols actually go after being released and whether they reach the desired target areas of the clouds in adequate concentrations. The NDTE research is focused on using tracer materials to reduce these uncertainties. The project's field experiments were conducted near Bismarck in the summer of 1993. ETL used the polarization capabilities of its NOAA/C radar to detect and track microwave chaff fibers that were that were released with the seeding agent and revealed the material's movement and dispersion inside the storm clouds.