OSWEGO, N.Y. — A SUNY Oswego professor will use a grant of more than $234,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support research into cold-air outbreaks (CAOs) in the sub-Arctic region, called the CAESAR project. Yonggang Wang, assistant professor of meteorology at SUNY Oswego, will take four students with him on the research trip […]
OSWEGO, N.Y. — A SUNY Oswego professor will use a grant of more than $234,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support research into cold-air outbreaks (CAOs) in the sub-Arctic region, called the CAESAR project.
Yonggang Wang, assistant professor of meteorology at SUNY Oswego, will take four students with him on the research trip in early 2024, the university said in an announcement.
The experiment will use “state-of-the-art” facilities and deploy an NSF National Center for Arctic Research (NCAR) C-130 aircraft to document convective clouds during cold-air outbreaks.
The clouds can produce heavy snowfall, occasionally generating intense “polar lows” that affect the overall climate of the Arctic. Researchers will study the outbreaks over the open waters between northern Sweden and the Arctic ice edge from Feb. 22 to April 7, 2024.
The NCAR C-130 aircraft has a 10-hour flight endurance, with a 2,900 nautical-mile range at up to 27,000 feet and can carry up to 13,000 pounds, SUNY Oswego said. The team is aiming to use research materials that have never been used before to study the Arctic CAOs. Those materials include radars and lidars, aerosol, cloud, precipitation and trace-gas probes, SUNY Oswego said.
Wang says one research aspect of using this aircraft is similar to that of using a weather balloon. However, those are primarily used over land. The NCAR aircraft will allow the team to study these outbreaks over large bodies of water.
“With the dropsonde system deployed from the aircraft, we can measure the vertical profiles of ambient temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction above water. After dropsondes are launched from the aircraft, they will fall down to the surface to give us some really nice measurements of the state of the atmosphere, so we are really excited that we have this facility,” Wang explained in a release.
For those not familiar with the subject matter, Wang says the cold-air outbreaks in this region of the world are similar to lake-effect snow patterns in the Oswego area — intense and unpredictable.
“The forecasting of lake-effect snow bands is also very challenging. Because of their small scales, sometimes the models cannot predict some key variables very accurately,” Wang said. “Hopefully, the students who are involved in the CAESAR project, and working on the data when it’s done, will understand the characteristics of the cold-air outbreaks, and that will help them better understand lake-effect snow events, so they can make significant contributions to our future forecasting of lake-effect snow, which is really important to the people who live in this area.”