Colloquium: Tuesday, 5 May 2009, EN6085A, 3:00 pm

A field study known as the Storm Peak Laboratory Cloud Property Validation Experiment (StormVEx) will take place at the Desert Research Institute’s Storm Peak Lab (SPL) in winter 2010/11. StormVEx is designed to obtain both in situ and remote observations of cloud properties in liquid and mixed-phase clouds which will provide a correlative data set for validation of retrieval algorithms. The experiment will be the maiden deployment of the second Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurements (ARM) mobile facility (AMF2), which comprises radar, microwave and lidar instruments for measuring clouds and precipitation. We are also proposing an airborne component to StormVEx involving the Wyoming King Air which would provide information about the vertical variations of the cloud properties and allow assessment of both vertical and horizontal homogeneities. In this talk we will describe the SPL research facility and its instrumentation capabilities as well as the StormVEx experimental design and anticipated outcomes.