Meet IMPACTS’ Student Forecasters

Map of freezing levels - the altitude at which the temperature is 0°C in the atmosphere. This is one of the things forecasters look at to find the snow the fly through and keep the plane safe. Credit: NASA
Map of freezing levels – the altitude at which the temperature is 0°C in the atmosphere. This is one of the things forecasters look at to find the snow the fly through and keep the plane safe. Credit: NASA

By Ellen Gray /NASA’S WALLOPS FLIGHT FACILITY, VIRGINIA/

The IMPACTS team is what makes the field campaign happen. Over 200 people are contributing to the project from aircraft crews and managers, to support and logistics staff, to the scientists running the instruments and asking the big questions. They include veteran pilots and mission managers, university and NASA researchers who’ve done field campaigns before, and graduate students on their first campaign.

Field campaigns provide valuable training and perspective in researchers’ early careers. We caught up with three students who are on the rotating roster for the IMPACTS forecasting team. Their responses have been edited for clarity.

Sebastian Harkema is lead forecaster this week, working in IMPACTS Mission Operations Center just off the P-3 hangar at Wallops Flight Facility. Credit: NASA
Sebastian Harkema is lead forecaster this week, working in IMPACTS Mission Operations Center just off the P-3 hangar at Wallops Flight Facility. Credit: NASA

My name is Sebastian Harkema. I’m a first year PhD candidate at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. This is my first field campaign in general so I’m super excited about this. I’m actually studying snowfall so I’m going to be using the IMPACTS data as part of my PhD for the next three years. Specifically, I’m looking at thundersnow, so I’m hoping to use some of the instrumentation to look at that and to understand how lightning and snowfall can be used in nowcasting—predicting heavy snowfall, where the models really have trouble in that near-term period where forecasters really need that information.

Being a forecaster is different. Going from research to being an actual forecaster is kind of challenging. Because when you’re a researcher you’re staring at a TV screen or a monitor all day. For forecasting you’re doing that but it’s in a completely different environment. As for my schedule, showing up at 5:45 am in the morning, having to put a presentation together by 8:45 am and presenting at 9 am, that’s a challenge unto itself, let alone trying to understand what is going on in the atmosphere. So I definitely give a lot of credit to all the forecasters throughout the United States, and the world—Props to you guys! It’s a lot of hard work and I definitely appreciate it a lot more than I did in the past.

Ben Kiel in the IMPACTS Mission Ops Center at Wallops Flight Facility. Credit: NASA
Ben Kiel in the IMPACTS Mission Ops Center at Wallops Flight Facility. Credit: NASA

I’m Ben Kiel and I’m a Masters student at Stonybrook University in New York. With IMPACTS, I’m helping out with storm forecasts, if there are storms to forecast for. It’s been quite a bit of challenge I would have to say. We were hoping for more storms than what we’ve had so far. It’s kind of funny, most people want good weather, we want bad weather.

This one that we’re looking going after Saturday is one where, if the pattern was more active it’s one we wouldn’t prefer to chase because it’s a messy system. There’s a lot of dry air getting into it. It’s a very warm system. There’s going to be a lot of rain. At least there will be snow aloft. There’s certainly things we can learn from snow aloft, because that’s how this rain is forming as it’s staring out as snow and then falling down and then turning into rain. So we’ll take it.

My main focus will not actually be directly related to IMPACTS. I’m actually working with IMPACTS mission scientist Brian Colle, I’ll be doing a project related to machine learning. It’s a different sort of problem, trying to figure out or explain why our weather models are so variable. We’re trying to find better explanations so that we can pinpoint and improve them. So that’s not necessarily directly related to the IMPACTS project but the data that comes from here will probably certainly get ingested into my work as time goes on. All of these projects end up connected in some way that one acts as a validation for the other. We’ll see what happens there. I’m looking forward to it.

Phillip Yeh and Joe Finlon look at forecasts in the IMPACTS Mission Operations Center, at Wallops Flight Facility, Jan 23.
Phillip Yeh and Joe Finlon look at forecasts in the IMPACTS Mission Operations Center at Wallops Flight Facility, Jan 23. Credit: NASA

My name is Phillip Yeh and I grew up in Parsippany, New Jersey, and I’m currently at Stonybrook University as a PhD student. My focus for my PhD project will likely be using the data that we gather from the IMPACTS project to understand these snow bands associated with these snow storms here in the North East.

I am helping with forecasting for the IMPACTS project. So forecasting involves many things. A lot of it involves looking at the weather models and trying to figure out where the storm is going to be, especially in regard to the timing of the storm, in regard to where the rain/snow line is going to set up, and in regard to where we should be flying the plane. This is my first field campaign. I think the biggest thing I’m looking forward to is the opportunity to fly on the P-3 and the second biggest thing is being able to launch weather balloons, which I’ll do when I leave Wallops and go back to Stonybrook where we’re doing that.

I’ve always loved snow ever since I was young, and often times watched as a snow storm runs too far to the south or to the north and just misses us, or occasionally when the snow hits us perfectly, and also seeing how the forecast models may struggle with getting the location of a storm right.