Impact
Safer winter driving with snowflake imaging
Camera system captures critical data about falling snowflakes which can help improve weather radars and snowfall prediction accuracy
October 4, 2017
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Falling snow makes winter driving a challenge. Transportation planners, road crews and emergency managers can now estimate real-time accumulations with active imaging from multi-angle snowflake cameras (MASC). NSF-funded research led to development of MASC, which images snowflakes down to the diameter of a human hair and simultaneously measures how fast they fall. These data have been critical for verifying snowfall predictions and winter precipitation algorithms for weather radars.
NSF Directorate(s):
Directorate for Geosciences
Locations
Utah
Related Awards
#1127692 Collaborative Research: The Wasatch Hydrometeor Aggregation and Riming Experiment
#1417234 STTR Phase I: Development of a Freefall Precipitation Camera for Weather Monitoring Systems
#1531930 Collaborative Research: Impact of Snowfall Processes on Potential Vorticity Generation in High-Latitude Snow Events
Related Websites
The Multi-angle Snowflake Camera: https://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/good-bye?http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Snowflakes/MASC.html
Camera Captures Falling Snowflakes in 3-D: https://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/good-bye?https://www.livescience.com/26369-cameras-capture-falling-snowflakes-in-3d.html
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