RAL's winter weather group is involved with a variety of projects, including the Colorado Headwaters project focused on the impact of climate change on snowpack in the West, developing systems to improve the nowcast and short term forecast of winter storms for aircraft ground deicing purposes, evaluating snowgauges and other winter instrumentation systems at the Marshall field site, evaluating winter orographic cloud seeding potential for the state of Wyoming and basic studies of winter precipitation.

For aviation, we have focused on developing two new systems in support of Ground Deicing operations. The Check Time system is a UCAR patented technology for aircraft ground deicing that determines when the fluid is close to failure (Check Time) of an applied aircraft deicing fluid based on temperature measurements and precipitation rates that update every minute. The check time is aircraft independent and only requires the end user to know the time that the aircraft was deiced. The Check Time system is based on the Liquid Water Equivalent (LWE) system, which determines precipitation rate and type. The LWE system combines a Hotplate and GEONOR snow gauge, a Vaisala PWD-22 precipitation type sensor, a Campbell freezing rain sensor, and a Vaisala WXT wind, temperature, and humidity sensor to estimate a real-time liquid water equivalent precipitation rate in support of the determination of holdover times for de/anti-icing fluids./p>

This web site provides links to these various projects as available, and also access to real-time data collected as part of these various projects.

Note: full phone: 303 - 497 - XXXX | email addresses end in "@ucar.edu"

Primary Contacts

• RASMUSSEN, Roy: | HAP DIRECTOR | ph: 8430 | email: rasmus