To better understand winter storms that can devastate the Midwest and East Coast, NASA is utilizing specially equipped planes to study them.

Two airplanes laden with instruments capable of measuring atmospheric conditions and snow particle sizes, shapes, and population density, are being used to study snowstorms.

One of the planes, a civilian derivative of the high-flying U2 reconnaissance plane, flies upwards of 65,000 feet above a snowstorm. It contains the same instruments on weather satellites, but because of its lower elevation, higher resolution and more frequent observations are available during the flight.

Meanwhile, a P-3 Orion research plane flies into the storm at an altitude up to 28,000 feet —about the cruising altitude of a commercial jet. These flights can directly measure cloud and snow conditions while also dropping radiosondes into the storms. Radiosondes act as reverse weather balloons by measuring weather conditions into the snowstorm. They are only released while over the ocean.

The P-3 Orion planes have been used to research hurricanes for years. No time off for them.

The information collected from these flights, along with supplemented data from ground researchers utilizing radar and weather balloon launches, will be used to better understand atmospheric conditions that produce the heavy snow bands that can produce upwards of two feet of snow in a narrow corridor.

This research will be utilized to improve computer weather forecast models that are used to forecast snowstorms like this weekend’s big New England blizzard.