The NASA Ground Validation Field Campaign at UConn: measuring winter precipitation with novel instruments

The NASA Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Ground Validation (GV) field campaign at the University of Connecticut (UConn) is an ongoing winter precipitation instruments deployment for measuring frozen precipitation and its characteristics. The instruments include an assortment of K-band and W-band profiling radars and Ka-Ku band scanning radars, weighing, and tipping bucket pluviometers, laser and video disdrometers, high-speed and high-resolution cameras for quantitative precipitation measurement, weather stations, and an unmanned aircraft system for environmental variables. The goal of this field campaign is to provide an unprecedented dataset of wintry precipitation observations from multiple traditional and novel precipitation measurement instruments. This dataset, that will be made publicly available after completing quality control, can be used for validating NASA GPM products, to examine the error characteristics of co-located ground-based instruments, or to investigate microphysical properties of snow crystals. In this presentation, after introducing the instrument suite, I will discuss possible uses of this unique set of measurements for snow microphysics or remote sensing applications.