Climatic Wind Tunnel Experiments for Weather Microphysics

The goal of this work is to evaluate the various hydrometeor characteristics for testing new technologies related to aerospace, autonomous cars, and Arctic structures in a climatic wind tunnel (CWT) instrumented with various microphysics probes, visibility sensors, and precipitation gauges as well as dynamical sensors. The Ontario Tech University has been collaborating with ECCC since 2014. The university has adapted various aircraft and surface meteorological instruments for extreme weather conditions at temperatures down to -30^oC and winds up to 180 km/hr. Rain, drizzle, snow, freezing precipitation, ice fog, and warm fog conditions are generated using various nozzle systems and a newly designed platforms for rain. Currently, all probes are being tested for extreme weather conditions for various durations: FM100 for fog droplet spectra, a gondola with CDP and BCP for cloud droplets, a GCIP for ice fog, drizzle, and light rain, a LPM for rain and snow hydrometeors, covering 1 µm to 1 cm size range. These measurements can be used for better evaluation of fog, cloud, and precipitation impact on technologies and products. Although there are some issues in the types of particle generation, overall the conditions in the CWT are promising for characterization of various fog and icing type as well as other hydrometeors. This work will emphasize and show some results obtained from Ontario Tech’s CWT and summarize various platforms for future applications.