NDTE
Contact:Brooks Martner
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.
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