News

5 November 2024

During the recent 20th Cyclone Workshop at St. Sauveur, Quebec, Canada, the communities of NAWDIC, AR Recon, the planned US mission NURTURE as well as interested participants of the workshop came together in a relaxed environment to foster the collaboration and discuss coordinated planning procedures for the upcoming dry run and the implementation phase in winter 2025/26.

17 October 2024

Between 16 and 18 September 2024, the NAWDIC coordination team received a visit from Dr. Marty Ralph (Director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, CW3E) and Dr. Luca Delle Monache (Director of Research of CW3E). The visit included a tour of the KITcube facilities, a demonstration of the KITsonde, and a special seminar presented by both to the IMKTRO. Additionally, on the final day, a meeting was held between the NAWDIC coordination team and AR Recon to plan the NAWDIC Dry Run scheduled to take place from 27 January to 7 February 2025.

2 October 2024

In preparation for the deployment of the KITsonde measurement system during NAWDIC, a one-week instrument assembling workshop took place in August 2024 at KIT. The KITsonde is a modular multi-sensor dropsonde system that allows to simultaneously launch up to four meteorological measurement sondes from a research aircraft. Shortly after being dropped from more than 10 km above ground, the sondes are released from a discharge container and drift on diverging trajectories due to differently sized parachutes. When reaching the ground, the sondes have separated by up to 70 km, depending on the prevailing wind profile. Meteorological measurements and position data are sent to the aircraft every second, which allows to capture both vertical profiles of temperature, humidity, and wind at a resolution of around 10 m and the mesoscale variability of the troposphere.

The unique and specially designed KITsonde system was developed at KIT in collaboration with enviscope GmbH and Graw Radiosondes GmbH & Co. KG and is prefabricated only in small numbers. Members of the NAWDIC team as well as highly motivated colleagues of the institute now spent a whole week assembling release containers, cutting parachutes, and packing measurement sondes. Thanks to this great collaborative effort, they have completed more than 20 release containers packed with a total of 60 sondes, which will be deployed for preparatory measurements during the ASCCI campaign in March 2025. For NAWDIC, another 110 release containers equipped with 340 sondes will be prepared for airborne deployment. The measurements taken with the KITsonde system during both campaigns will be sent in real-time to the global telecommunication system (GTS) of WMO. This will make the data available to meteorological centers worldwide and allow the data to be assimilated into their numerical weather prediction systems.

10 July 2024

From 1 to 5 July 2024, three members of the KIT NAWDIC team traveled to Brittany (northwestern France) to search for measurement locations for the KITcube observation system. The NAWDIC-KITcube component will focus on the downward momentum transport during dry intrusion events using meso- to micro-scale ground-based observations, which will be conducted near the city of Brest during an extended winter period in 2025/26. The inspection of potential measurement sites was greatly supported by colleagues of Ifremer in Plouzané and Marine Meteorology & Offshore centre of Meteo France in Guipavas.