83rd Annual

Monday, 10 February 2003
Theater snow depth estimates for Department of Defense applications
Paul J. McCrone, Air Force Weather Agency, Offutt AFB, NE
Poster PDF (596.5 kB)
Meteorologists at the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) were presented with a difficult challenge: provide war-fighters in the south asian area of operations with detailed snow depth estimates. This problem was posed to the Meteorological Satellite (METSAT) Applications Branch at AFWA. The greatest obstacle was the lack of surface snow depth reports coming from the south asia region. Passive microwave data sets from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) were employed operationally to provide analysis data for the region of interest. This presentation will summarize the use of the DMSP microwave data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) as well as the Operational Linescan System (OLS) to add insight into the distribution of snow over the area of interest. In addition, our gridded, global estimate products and methods will be discussed, including the manual bogus for our numerical weather prediction models.

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