NASA’s CloudCube Pioneers Miniaturized Radar to Study Clouds, Precipitation
Why this matters: new research or scientific developments with potential real-world impact.
A compact, multifrequency radar built by a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will make it easier to collect information about dynamic cloud systems. Called Cloud Cube, this new instrument simultaneously probes the atmosphere with three radar signals, spanning 36 to 240 GHz, for optimized sensitivity to a wide range of water droplet and ice particle sizes. Figure 1: A prototype of Cloud Cube’s G-band channel was installed at Cape Grim, Tasmania, as a guest instrument for the Department of Energy’s Cloud and Precipitation Experiment at Kennaook (CAPE-K) Credit: Raquel Rodriguez Monje / JPL Built with funding from NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office Instrument Incubator Program, CloudCube transmits and receives Ka-, W-, and G-band signals, making it the first compact radar system capable of simultaneously probing meteorological targets at wavelengths spanning approximately one to ten millimeters. Researchers will be able to combine information from the three signals to learn more about the initiation and evolution of precipitation, as well as cloud microphysics and radiative properties. “We’re making a low-power, low-mass instrument to facilitate new cost-efficient missions for atmospheric observations. Building a multi-frequency radar, especially at G-band, is very novel,” said Raquel Rodriguez Monje, a systems engineer at JPL and principal investigator for CloudCube. Each of CloudCube’s three signals observes a different element of cloud physics. Ka-band radar signals are ideal for collecting precipitation profiles; W-band radar signals are preferred for measuring cloud particles that give rise to precipitation; and G-band radar signals, which have never been collected from a space-based instrument, are ideal for measuring ice and liquid water content inside very light clouds (a paper describing this measurement can be found here). Probing the atmosphere simultaneously with three signals allows researchers to collect data on all these cloud features at once,