WISP

The Winter Icing and Storms Project is a multi-investigator program to study the meteorological conditions that produce hazardous aircraft icing conditions in winter storms. To a large extent, this entails forecasting and detecting regions of supercooled liquid water in the storms. ETL's participation in the Denver area field experiments from 1990 to 1994 included the use of microwave radiometers to monitor the vertically-integrated liquid water content of winter clouds and the NOAA/K and NOAA/C radars to observe the clouds' fine-scale internal structure and motions. A dual-wavelength technique for mapping the liquid water regions of clouds was tested and radar polarization signatures of water drops, and various ice crystal types were developed using theoretical modeling and observations.