NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

For more information contact:

Elvia H. Thompson
Headquarters,
Washington, DC
(Phone: 202/358-1696)

Rob Gutro
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
(Phone: 301/286-4044)

Lane Stephenson
Texas A & M
Phone: 979/845-4662

Betty Flowers
NASA Wallops Flight Facility
Phone: 757/824-1584

Experiment website

Aqua website

AMSR-E instrument website

Caption for Image 1: Wakasa Bay and the Study Area Wakasa Bay is located near the center of the Japan Sea Coast. Because of its location North of Osaka on the Sea of Japan, it is known for its diverse weather in winter months. Weather ranges from cold air outbreaks that bring cold Siberian air and accompanying snows into the region, to fast moving extra-tropical low pressure systems that consist primarily of rain.

This map represents the study area for the field campaign. The equipment used in the area include: two C-band Dual-Polarized Doppler Radars from Japan, the Gulfstream II - a Japanese research aircraft, NASA P-3 aircraft, and ground and ship based observations (designated as JMA). The solid circles indicate areas where Doppler radar will be used. Credit: David O'C. Starr, NASA

Caption for Image 2: NASA's Aqua Satellite "Aqua," Latin for "water," is a NASA Earth Science satellite mission named for the large amount of information that the mission will be collecting about the Earth's water cycle, including evaporation from the oceans, water vapor in the atmosphere, clouds, precipitation, soil moisture, sea ice, land ice, and snow cover on the land and ice. Aqua will be flying over the Wakasa Bay area of Japan gathering data about snowfall over the area.

Additional variables also being measured by Aqua include radiative energy fluxes, aerosols, vegetation cover on the land, phytoplankton and dissolved organic matter in the oceans, and air, land, and water temperatures. The Aqua mission is a part of the NASA-centered international Earth Observing System (EOS). Credit: NASA

Caption for Image 3: P-3B Orion Aircraft The P-3 is a 4-engine turboprop capable of long duration flights of 8-12 hours, large payloads up to 15,000 pounds, altitudes up to 30,000 feet and true airspeeds up to 330 knots. The aircraft has been modified by the Wallops Facility with a "glass" cockpit or electronic flight instrumentation system (EFIS) and a flight management system (FMS). The FMS integrates redundant laser reference, inertial navigation and GPS position data onto composite cockpit CRT displays with weather radar and graphical flight plan overlays. The EFIS outputs flight data to an ARINC 429 datastream for integration into user data systems. Credit: NASA Wallops Island

Caption for Image 4: How Japan Looks from Satellite

This true-color image of Japan from the Moderate Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA's Terra satellite shows snow on some of the mountains on Honshu (bottom) and Hokkaido (center). This image was taken on April 29, 2002. At the bottom of the image, white streaks mark the passage of airplanes to and from Tokyo. Credit: Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC

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January 29, 2003 - (date of web publication)

NASA JOINS SNOW STUDY OVER THE SEA OF JAPAN

	Image 1

NASA and two Japanese government agencies are collaborating on a snowfall study over Wakasa Bay, Japan. Using NASA's Earth Observing System Aqua satellite, research aircraft and coastal radars to gather data, the joint effort is expanding scientific knowledge about where precipitation falls.

Until now, the north Pacific's contributions to the global hydrologic cycle have been difficult to quantify. Precipitation measurements by satellite over open water are very important, because there are very few other ways to obtain the data. Snowfall is particularly difficult to measure from space even over the relatively uniform background of the ocean. New satellite instruments, that can detect precipitation over water, will give scientists data to help interpret how the hydrology of the Pacific Ocean impacts the U.S. and the world.

	Image 2

The Wakasa Bay Field Campaign is a combined research effort among NASA, the National Space Agency of Japan (NASDA), and the Japanese Meteorological Research Institute (MRI). The campaign began January 3 and runs through February 14.

"These experiments are critical to understanding whether the current El Nino event, for instance, actually increases global precipitation or merely redistributes it between land and ocean regions," said Tom Wilheit, Mission Scientist from Texas A&M University.

	Image 3

Wakasa Bay, located North of Osaka on the Sea of Japan, is known for its diverse weather in winter months. Ranging from extreme cold, that brings Siberian air and accompanying snow into the region, to fast moving extra-tropical low pressure systems, that consist primarily of rain at the surface, but originating as snowfall at higher altitudes.

A NASA P-3 Orion aircraft, from Wallops Island, Va., is flying over the bay and collecting data on snowfall and rainfall to compare to data being gathered by the Aqua satellite orbiting over the same area. The aircraft payload consists of five microwave sensors, each capable of uniquely observing precipitation and cloud properties.

On board Aqua is a Japanese-built Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) instrument. "With AMSR-E on Aqua, we're able to extend the high quality precipitation measurements from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite to beyond the tropics, in fact into both the mid-and high latitudes," said Claire Parkinson, Aqua Project Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

	Image 4

Some of the measurements will also be used for another field campaign concerning sea ice in the Sea of Okhotsk and to compare with data from the AMSR instrument aboard the Japanese ADEOS-II satellite.

The Wakasa Bay experiment is designed to test the calculations and methods that scientists use to process satellite data. The P-3 Orion observations will be used to get precise values for the cloud and precipitation properties, such as the size distribution of the ice particles or raindrops, that are currently assumed in the satellite calculations. By replacing the assumed data with precise observations from the P-3, scientists can determine the accuracy of the Aqua AMSR-E rainfall and snowfall estimates. The data collected by the P3 aircraft was enhanced through collaboration with the WMO-03 (Winter Mesoscale Convective System Observation -2003) experiment. The funding for this project was provided primarily by CREST (Core Research for Evolution Science and Technology) of JST (Japan Science and Technology Corporation). The Japan Meteorological Agency also operated upper-air sounding observations of vessels (Kofu-maru, Seifu-maru, and Chofu-maru) and ground-based upper-air sounding sites (Akita, Wajima and Yonago). The data sets contributed by CREST, including G2 (Gulfstream-II, a twin jet) cloud physical observation, Doppler radar observation, and upper-air sounding, will allow a more complete description of the atmosphere to emerge than is possible from a single observing platform.

"This mission will be helpful in understanding the north Pacific, because there is simply no place in this vast stretch of ocean where surface observations can be taken. Despite its remoteness, the ocean's size makes it an important player in the global hydrologic cycle that must be properly quantified to make progress in the global sense," said Christian Kummerow, Atmospheric Scientist at Colorado State University, Boulder, Co., one of the leaders of this mission.

NASA's Aqua satellite was launched on May 4, 2002. The Aqua mission provides a multi-disciplinary study of the Earth's atmospheric, oceanic, cryospheric, and land processes and their relationship to global change.

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