To Predict Snowfall, NASA Planes Fly into the Storm

By Susan Cosier

The aircraft’s windshield was a sheet of pure gray, with visibility nearly zero as the NASA P-3 rattled through a snowstorm at 15,000 feet. Probes affixed to the wings measured ice particle sizes in the clouds, infrared thermometers recorded temperatures, and cameras snapped thousands of pictures of ice crystals. As the data rolled in, more than a dozen scientists in the cabin logged the information. Eight miles overhead, a pilot flew another plane through the very top of the same cloud. The air was so thin that he wore a spacesuit.

This eight-hour mission was one of many conducted over three years for a NASA program called Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms (IMPACTS). The project involves more than 300 atmospheric scientists, meteorologists and crew members. Data from their flights, which were completed in February 2023, are filling gaps in scientists’ knowledge of snowstorm physics—such as where in a cloud ice crystals form and the conditions under which they fall out as snow. The findings will be used to help forecasters better predict where snow will fall and how much will accumulate—a difficult task, much to the chagrin of meteorologists, skiers and schoolchildren hoping for snow days.

“We’re really trying to understand how all these different processes act together to produce the snowstorms that create the havoc,” says Robert M. Rauber, a recently retired atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who serves as one of the project’s principal investigators.

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