A team of NASA scientists deployed on an international mission designed to better understand severe winter storms. The North American Upstream Feature-Resolving and Tropopause Uncertainty Reconnaissance Experiment, or NURTURE, is an airborne campaign that uses a suite of remote sensing instruments to collect atmospheric data on winter weather with a goal of improving the models that feed storm forecasts. This combination of instruments will also serve as a proxy to demonstrate the potential to collect similar observations from space.

On Jan. 24, the research team departed from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, aboard the center’s Gulfstream III aircraft (G-III) en route to Goose Bay, Canada.  For nearly a month, the plane will be making flights stretching from the Northern Atlantic Ocean over Canada through the Northeast United States, measuring moisture, clouds, and ozone as winter storms develop.

The second phase of the campaign, scheduled to fly out of Langley next year, will serve as the inaugural mission of NASA’s new airborne science laboratory, a Boeing 777 These flights will cover a larger range of 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) and use a larger suite of instruments. Researchers will collect detailed observations of the atmosphere over Europe, Greenland, the North Atlantic Ocean, Canada, the majority of  of the U.S., and much of the Arctic Ocean.

“Part of NASA’s role is to leverage our expertise and resources for the benefit of humankind – with innovation always being at our core,” said Will McCarty, weather program manager and program scientist at NASA’s Headquarters in Washington. “The NURTURE campaign is doing exactly that by outfitting our aircraft with one-of-a-kind instruments designed to put our science data into action to understand dangerous weather events before, and as they form.”

As the NASA G-III flies over Canada, a parallel companion mission led by a team of international partners called the North Atlantic Waveguide, Dry Intrusion, and Downstream Impact Campaign (NAWDIC) will be operating out of Shannon, Ireland. Meanwhile, a third airborne mission led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will be studying how moisture is transported from the tropics to the Western U.S. By combining the data collected during these campaigns, scientists will be able to track weather systems as they interact and intersect globally to understand the large-scale flows and small-scale features that drive high-impact winter weather events. 

“These storms are not forecasted very accurately,” said Amin Nehrir, a research scientist at NASA Langley and co-investigator for the NURTURE mission. “Space observations of high latitudes in the Arctic lack the sensitivity needed to gather accurate data in such a dry, atmospheric environment. In lower latitudes, we benefit from observations from radiosondes, surface networks, and satellite observations. We are using cutting-edge technology beyond those that we have in space to get a better snapshot of atmospheric dynamics.”

Examples of severe winter weather events include cold air outbreaks, windstorms, hazardous seas, snow and ice storms, sea ice breakup, and extreme precipitation. Data from the NURTURE mission will be used to inform first responders, decision makers, and the public sooner while also demonstrating the potential for NASA’s remote weather sensor capabilities to be developed for use on future space-based missions.

“Effects from severe weather have significant costs that threaten lives and national security by destabilizing supply chains and damaging infrastructure,” said Steven Cavallo, principal investigator for NURTURE and lead scientist at the University of Oklahoma, School of Meteorology.

The NURTURE mission is funded by NASA’s Earth Science Division and managed by researchers at NASA Langley and NASA Ames in collaboration with the University of Oklahoma.

To learn more about NURTURE, visit:

https://espo.nasa.gov/nurture