Behind the scenes: NASA scientists take flight in Pacific Northwest

The high-tech weather satellite, considered the most advanced ever flown, is able to quantify rain and snowfall around the globe with an eye toward eventually providing data from under-equipped areas such as the ocean and remote swaths of land.

With its trademark temperate rainforests glistening in green, Washington State's scenic Olympic Peninsula is considered one of the wettest places in the continental United States. According to the National Parks Service the region can receive as much as twelve feet of rain, while higher elevations can measure in dozens of feet of snow per year.

In order to ensure that what the satellite reports accurately matches what is happening dozens of miles below, NASA is rolling out an extensive array of assets on the ground and in the air. Currently stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, just south of Tacoma, Wash, one of those air assets is NASA’s unusual Douglas DC-8 flying laboratory. The jet took to the air for the first time in 1969—the same year NASA landed a man on the moon—and flew for Alitalia and Braniff before the space agency converted it to a research platform in the 1980s.

While the much of the outside and some of the inside still bear the essentially 1950s-era construction, design, and tech of the DC-8,

it also carries some of the most sophisticated scientific equipment available today.

Much of that equipment enables the jet to serve as both validator and stand-in for the GPM satellite as it cruises high above the storms for hours on end.

A recent track, indicated by the red line in the photo taken during a flight on Saturday, December 5th, may seem without logic, but the flight crews and mission control folks on board work hard to provide the scientists ample opportunity to overfly dozens of ground-based monitoring and radar stations scattered across the peninsula.

The airplane has been outfitted with much of the same radar and radiometer equipment as the GPM satellite has itself, but since the satellite may only pass over the region once or twice per day, the use of the jetliner allows researchers to collect considerably more data on individual weather events.

If and when things go awry, and eventually they always do, scientists like Rachael Kroodsma (right) and Caitlyn Cooke (left) have the unusual ability to climb down into the cargo hold of the jet and tinker with the equipment.

But not everything is staring at screens for five hours or more. One of the more unique features of the aircraft is its ability to deploy dropsondes out of a tube at the back of the airplane.

Researcher Clayton Arendt explains that the cylinder contains sensors that transmit atmospheric data back to the jet as it falls, via parachute, from our cruising altitude of 39,000 feet down to the ocean.

The DC-8 is not the only airborne asset to be deployed on OLYMPEX. Its exceptionally rare ER2 jet performs many of the same missions as the DC-8, but from an impressive altitude of 65,000 feet. Another jet, a Cessna Citation, typically flies through the storms themselves.

On the ground, over three dozen rain and snow gauges dot the vast expanse of the peninsula. In addition, several ground-based radar systems have been busily scanning the sky and collecting data since mid-November.

A truck-mounted Doppler-on-wheels radar system is based on the scenic shores of Lake Quinault (seen here), while thirty-some miles to the southwest, near Moclips, Wash., the agency set up a 30-foot-wide, 60-ton radar dish installation on top of a ridge.

The radars can vertically slice through storm clouds, creating 3D images that show researchers like Hannah Barnes exactly what kind of precipitation—rain, snow, or ice—lies in the clouds and where. By combining the data sets from each asset—rain gauges, radar dishes, and airplanes—researchers will be able to create a giant pancake of data from each storm from the ground on up.