The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has awarded the State of New Hampshire (NH) an Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) grant to study low-level icing in cold and alpine environments. Plymouth State University (PSU) is the science lead on the program, which involves research partners from the U. S. Army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CCREL), the Mount Washington Observatory (MWO), and the NASA Glenn and Langley Research Centers. This grant will importantly support up to six PSU meteorology graduate students and expose them to field campaign activities, scientific collaboration, and different facets atmospheric modeling.

This project is designed to develop tools and techniques to model ice accretion at low levels in cold alpine environments. This will be accomplished by assessing the complex terrain and the meteorology of the Presidential Range of northern New Hampshire. Wind regimes and icing conditions will be simulated by integrating a digital terrain model, a mass and energy balance state of the ground model, an icing model and a mesoscale meteorological model. The integrated model will be validated against weather, wind and in situ and remote icing observations in the cold, complex terrain of northern New Hampshire. Statistical approaches to icing predictions will also be examined and those results compared to those of the numerical models.

The NASA Aviation Safety Program's Integrated Intelligent Flight Deck Project has a strong interest in understanding and characterizing flight hazards, including in-flight icing. Further, identification of the remotely detectable signature of terrain enhanced icing conditions is of interest to enable the development of ground and airborne hazard avoidance systems. The project will also help to validate remote sensing technology and satellite methods of estimating icing, both of which have been developed by NASA Research Centers. Therefore, this project will contribute to NASA's flight safety objectives and research goals. Besides this project's obvious connection to NASA's aviation interests, this project also has applicability to renewable energy, since ice accretion is a major problem for wind turbines located in cold and alpine environments.

This paper will provide a general overview of the technology associated with this project and emphasize the educational aspects because of the student involvement and contributions.