Flying into the unknown: Inside NASA’s mission from Labrador

Sometimes to understand the weather, you have to fly straight into it.

In hangar 8 at the 5 Wing Goose Bay base in central Labrador, a team is getting a NASA aircraft ready to do that — head directly into the atmosphere’s most unpredictable regions.

It’s a major research mission led by NASA, called the North American Upstream Feature-Resolving and Tropopause Uncertainty Reconnaissance Experiment (or the welcomed abbreviation NURTURE for anyone who’s not a weather scientist). 

Over the course of four to six weeks, a couple of teams — made up mainly of scientists, along with a couple of pilots and aircraft maintenance personnel — are chasing storms, before they’re even born, where the atmosphere is largely unmeasured high above the Arctic. 

The goal is to improve winter weather forecasting. But the tricky part is they’re looking for something they can’t see.

I got to talk to members of one of the NASA teams before they took off for the skies, on the very plane they’d be flying. 

This was a dream come true. NASA is so iconic and here the agency was in our province doing weather research to help improve the forecast models I use everyday. 

You’ve likely heard a lot about the polar vortex recently. It’s around every winter — an area of frigid air sitting over the Earth’s polar regions. It’s caused by the big temperature difference between cold air over the Arctic and warm air in the tropics which then creates a jet stream trapping the cold air at the North and South Poles.

Embedded within the larger polar vortex are smaller spinning pockets of cold air called tropospheric polar vortices, (or TPVs, for anyone, again, who likes abbreviations and who’s not a weather scientist).

If you stepped outside and looked up while one passed over head, you wouldn’t notice anything unusual. Often, there are no clouds. No dramatic satellite image. No obvious sign they’re there.

But these small atmospheric features can shape some of the most powerful winter storms we experience.

“They can be involved with helping develop individual storms. The ones that do produce the clouds and precipitation and snowfall that you experience,” said Lynn McMurdie, a research professor from the University of Washington and part of the NASA team on the ground, and in the air, in Labrador.

In other words, what happens thousands of kilometres north of Newfoundland and Labrador can determine whether we get flurries or a major winter storm.

Modern weather models are powerful. They simulate the atmosphere, analyzing millions of data points to predict what will happen days into the future.