Year in Review: Visiting a NASA High-Altitude Research Project

*Note: This post is partly comprised of an article originally published in the June 30 edition of the 'Council Grove Republican' newspaper. A PDF of the original story can be found here.

My sister and I got an up-close view of a NASA high-altitude experiment this summer.

Early in June I read an article about a NASA Earth Venture Suborbital research project based out of the Salina Airport. The Dynamics and Chemistry of the Summer Stratosphere (DCOTSS) project was meant to investigate the effects of intense thunderstorms on the stratosphere over the U.S. The goal was to look inside of a storm as it grows and to determine whether the stratosphere’s composition has changed because of fluctuations in climate.

The project was based in Salina because of its central location for viewing big storms occurring over a large portion of the U.S. Since I was working in Council Grove at the time, and my little sister Melinda lived in Emporia, I thought it would be fun for both of us to go check out this venture. I looked up the people quoted in the article and contacted them about coming to see a flight for the sake of a newspaper article. The NASA folks said 'yes, we'd love to have you come out,' and on a rainy June 23 Melinda and I drove to Salina early in the morning to learn more about this impressive experiment.

As strong convective thunderstorms grow and shoot up into the lower stratosphere, they carry water and pollutants from the troposphere several miles up into the stratosphere -- which is usually quite dry -- and scientists say those pollutants may get trapped by summertime atmospheric circulation. That circulating wind current is called the North American Monsoon Anticyclone (NAMA). Air caught within the NAMA can remain there for quite a while, tossing around clockwise over the continent before escaping. The DCOTSS mission involved flying a ER-2 scientific aircraft up to 70,000 feet to collect measurements directly from overshooting thunderstorm tops.

Image courtesy DCOTSS/NASA.

The first DCOTSS flight for the year was in mid-May, so I only had a couple of chances left if I wanted to see this experiment in action. When Lindy and I arrived at the hangar, the NASA folks said there was a slim chance of takeoff that day because of the weather. Garden-variety thunderstorm squalls were a concern, so the plane was grounded until skies cleared and winds calmed. DCOTSS principal investigator Kenneth Bowman said the ER-2 aircraft, which is derived from the fuselage of a 1960s-era Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, houses 12 data-logging instruments throughout the plane. 

“The instruments pretty much all run automatically, or are controlled remotely from the ground,” Bowman said. “The pilot has one or two switches for each, basically to turn them on or off. We have satellite data links, so we can actually watch data come down while the aircraft is flying.” 

One of the instruments on board takes the standard meteorological readings – barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, and turbulence – while the remaining dataloggers record levels of things like water vapor, ozone, carbon monoxide and dioxide, along with chemicals like formaldehyde and chlorine. 

“We have two instruments that look at particles,” Bowman said. “One basically counts particles and sizes them… while the other takes one particle at a time and blasts it with a laser, to blow it apart and measure the fragments to tell what these microscopic particles are made of.” 

Bowman, who is the David Bullock Harris professor of geosciences at Texas A&M University, said researchers have collected a “huge amount” of data that has never been collected before, particularly from thunderstorm outflow, over the course of about a dozen flights. 

“We use NEXRAD radar and satellites to find out where these overshooting storms are happening, and then we can use the weather forecast from the winds to calculate where the material from that is going to go, and then we can fly through that later,” Bowman said. “That hadn’t really been tried before we started this.” 

The ER-2 scientific data-gathering plane.

Bowman said scientists are finding much more water than they expected in overshooting storm tops.

“It makes sense if water is coming from the ice clouds at the top of the storm,” Bowman said. “It tells us that there may not be as much air actually going up than we expected, but there’s also more water than expected.” 

Bowman said added water to the stratosphere, which is a greenhouse gas, actually warms the Earth’s surface. He said scientists have surmised for many years that storms with overshooting tops must be leaving material in the stratosphere, but they didn’t have any hard data to back up their thinking. 

“Part of this project is to provide that baseline, that understanding of how the atmosphere operates now, because as the climate continues to warm up, there may be a change in the way these storms happen, they may be more intense, higher, or more frequent,” Bowman said. “If we can figure out and model how things work now, we’ll have a much better chance of being able to predict how they might change in the future.”

Sadly, the plane remained grounded because of crosswinds that were just barely too strong. Regardless, Lindy and I had a great time meeting NASA researchers and atmospheric scientists, and we're incredibly thankful for them allowing us to come see their experiment in action. They were excited to share their work with us, and I think they enjoyed having guests geek out over their daily work environment. More than a dozen universities and federal agencies, like NOAA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, were involved in this project. 

Information gathered from this year’s field experiments will be made public early next year after scientists have analyzed and catalogued it. I'll write an updated report after the data is crunched. There's a lot more interesting information on the project's website.

Hopefully this is the start of many more NASA-related stories to come. I've said for a while that I'd love to be one of the first journalists to go to space, but for now I'm perfectly happy writing about the nature of thunderstorms 13 miles above Earth.