Storm Chasing with the NASA INCUS Mission

Dr. Susan van den Heever

Professor, Colorado State University

The transport of air and water within convective storms in the tropics provides fresh water, influences extreme weather, shapes cloud radiative forcing, and helps to drive the large-scale circulation. This transport of air and water – referred to as the convective mass flux (CMF) – is the focus of the NASA Investigation of Convective Updrafts (INCUS) mission, to be launched in 2026. INCUS is a train of 3 SmallSats, each carrying a Ka-band cloud radar. A passive microwave radiometer will also be housed on the middle SmallSat. The 3 observatories will be separated in time by 30, 90 and 120 seconds, thus facilitating the rapid, systematic, and repeated sampling of the same storm system, and the retrieval of CMF. Much research has been undertaken in preparation for the INCUS mission including generating an extensive database of high-resolution model simulations in regions throughout the tropics; analyzing these simulations to uncover key relationships about CMF and its variability; tracking observed and simulated storms throughout their lifetimes using a cloud object tracking tool; analyzing ground-based radar observations of storms obtained through rapid adaptive scanning techniques; and evaluating convective morphologies and environments using GPM observations and reanalysis datasets. After introducing the INCUS mission, this seminar will highlight several key results arising from this research.

Bio: Dr. Susan van den Heever is a University Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. She joined the CSU faculty in 2008 after obtaining her B.S. in Mathematics from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and her Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science from Colorado State University. Dr. van den Heever’s research is focused on convective cloud processes, specifically microphysical and dynamical feedbacks, updraft dynamics, cold pool dynamics, and aerosol-cloud interactions, as well as the representation of these processes in numerical models. She is the PI of the NASA INCUS mission, a recently selected Earth Ventures mission designed to better understand why, when and where convective storms form in the tropics, and why only some of these storms produce extreme weather. She also oversees the development of the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS), a sophisticated mesoscale model. Dr. van den Heever teaches graduate classes in cloud physics, cloud dynamics, and mesoscale modeling, and is a co-author of the book Storm and Cloud Dynamics. She is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, and has received the AGU ASCENT award, the AMS Edward Lorenz Teaching Excellence Award, the MIT Houghton Lectureship award, and several CSU teaching and mentoring awards. She is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford. Dr. van den Heever served as an editor of JAS, co-chairs the GEWEX Aerosol and Precipitation initiative, serves on several advisory boards, and recently co-chaired the Science Community Committee (SCC) of NASA’s Aerosol-Convection-Cloud-Precipitation (A-CCP) Pre-formulation Study.