IMPACTS: Aircraft Particle Probe Data for Atlantic Snowstorms

Data from January 2020 and January 2022 through February 2023 was collected by six instruments aboard the NASA P-3 aircraft during the IMPACTS field campaign. It provides particle size distributions from 2 microns to 3 centimeters and high-resolution particle images to study snowband formation and cloud microphysics. The dataset is available in netCDF-4 and PNG formats.

Use Cases

• Analyzing snow particle growth mechanisms across storm bands based on particle size distributions.
• Validating remote sensing retrievals of snowfall using in-situ aircraft measurements of particle size and type.
• Studying cloud droplet concentration and size spectra in winter storms using FastCDP data.
• Investigating the morphology of ice crystals and snowflakes from high-resolution CPI and 2D optical array probe images.

Strengths

• Covers a specific, multi-year field campaign (IMPACTS) with data from two winter seasons.
• Combines measurements from six complementary instruments, capturing particle sizes from 2 microns to 3 cm.
• Includes both analyzed data (netCDF) and raw browse imagery (PNG) for visual inspection.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific column names are not provided across platforms.
• The CPI instrument data lacks particle concentration estimates, limiting its quantitative use for certain analyses.
• License information is inconsistently reported as 'other-license-specified' or null.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Collected by six specific instruments (CPI, FastCDP, Hawkeye2D-S, 2D-S, HVPS3) on the NASA P-3 aircraft during the IMPACTS field campaign.

Time Range

January 18, 2020, through February 26, 2020, and January 14, 2022 through February 28, 2023.

Freshness

2026-04-09 23:44:57.164033

Geography

U.S. Atlantic coast region, specifically areas affected by snowstorms studied in the IMPACTS campaign.