NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Logo for the MC3E field campaign. From April to June, 2011, the Midlatitude Continental Convective Clouds Experiment (MC3E) took place in central Oklahoma. MC3E was a field campaign that measured large continental storms using a network of ground and airborne instruments, all of which provided information used to validate the instruments that will fly on the GPM Core Observatory in 2014. The MC3E field campaign took place near Lamont, Oklahoma in the region surrounding the Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program Southern Great Plains Central Facility. The experiment was a collaborative effort between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility and the GPM mission Ground Validation (GV) program. The field campaign leveraged an unprecedented observing infrastructure, combining extensive sounding arrays, remote sensing and in situ aircraft observations with NASA GPM GV instrumentation.

The overarching goals of this field campaign are to collect a comprehensive set of observations describing precipitation microphysics over continents during the warm season. The observations are used to refine GPM retrieval algorithms over land. At the same time, DOE objectives focused on relating the cloud microphysical observations to accompanying observations of cloud-kinematics and the surrounding environment. These observations are used to improve the understanding and representation of cloud and precipitation microphysical interactions within cloud-resolving models.

For more information on MC3E, visit: http://pmm.nasa.gov/science/ground-validation/mid-latitude-continental-convective-clouds-experiment-mc3e