Winter Icing and Storms Project (WISP)

The main goals of the project are to study the processes leading to the formation and depletion of supercooled liquid water in winter storms and to improve forecasts of aircraft icing. During the two field seasons, 2 research aircraft, 4 Doppler radars, 49 Mesonet stations, 7 CLASS sounding systems, 3 microwave radiometers, and a number of other facilities were deployed in the Front Range area. A comprehensive dataset was obtained on 8 anticyclonic storms, 16 cyclonic storms, and 9 frontal passages. Research highlights are presented for several studies under way to illustrate the types of analysis being pursued. The examples chosen include topics on anticyclonic upslope storms, heavy snowfall, large droplets, shallow cold fronts, ice crystal formation and evolution, and numerical model performance. -from Authors