This past weekend, a major blizzard blanketed the East Coast powdery white. While most were inside, two small planes decked out with sensors and scientific equipment raced into the storm.
The timing and regions hardest hit are often difficult to predict, especially when looking too far ahead of the event, says Yuter. “Often when you get a snowstorm forecast, it’ll say something like 3 to 8 inches, and the snow is expected to start sometime in the afternoon continuing into the evening. That’s an enormous range,” she says.
That’s why the team is examining if properties of the particles in clouds—like size, water content, and quantity—might contribute to snow bands with heavier snowfall. “Everybody likes to think that snow is always these beautiful star-shaped dendrites, but it’s actually very messy,” McMurdie says. “One of the things that can happen is a storm has a lot of upward motion, and it’s very vigorous. As the air goes up, it cools and condenses, and you make small tiny water drops in the cloud.
“Every storm is different,” says McMurdie. “Some storms don’t really have that much of a banded structure—but it still snows pretty good. The one this weekend had bands everywhere that were going crazy. And we’re like what is going on here? We don’t know what to make of this.”
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