"It will help us with short-term projections." Hartman said.
Hartman and his staff are part of a nationwide experiment that's tracking weather patterns unique to the west coast, all from the north fork of the American River.
"What causes precipitation to occur is the lift of the air mass up over the sierras and as those air masses are lifted they cool, and their ability to hold water is diminished and it rains."
Those warm storms mean more rain in the sierra, which equals more water into the rivers and streams.
There are many discoveries or at least definitions of phenomena that are taking place as a result of the HMT. The formation and the role of a barrier jet is a role of them. Atmospheric rivers are another one.
Here's what the studies have found:
Warm air from the tropics, sometimes called an "atmospheric river", or a pineapple express, make for warmer storms coming off the pacific.
Match those storms with quick-moving air that forms along the Sacramento valley and that moves rain higher up the mountains, only to flow into the rivers and back here into the valley.
"If we're going to give the public adequate lead time to get out of harm's way, we need to include those forecasts of rainfall in our model simulations in order to do that."
To get that lead time, NOAA, the national oceanographic and atmospheric agency, is tracking these exact kinds of storms, every winter, until this phase of testing ends in 2009.
"We're from boulder and when there's a storm we fly out and show up here and operate the radar."
Ellen Sukovich and Carroll Campbell run this high-tech radar at blue canyon every time a major storm hits the sierras.
They say they can actually look at how much precipitation actually comes down and verify it with the forecasts because forecasts aren't always right.
Using this brand new type of radar at the end of the blue canyon airport runway, scientists are able to give the exact position of the snow line in a storm. Precision is important because the higher the snow line, the greater the chance of flooding.
We can actually use this sort of technology to better understand and then also to see geographically if you're getting more precipitation as opposed to less.
And where the radar is high-tech, some of the best information comes from something very low-tech! While the boulderites play with radar, student Danny Kam plays with balloons, weather balloons!
So the radiosone, it's sort of the brain of the balloon. And these things have gotten a lot smaller over the years, but believe it or not these do a whole lot of different things. These things have GPS, it will measure temp, humidity, and air pressure all while it goes up to over 10 miles up into the air.
And it's going to radio that data back to the base station continuously so that we get a profile up through the atmosphere of what it really looks like.
Using the data from radar, weather balloons, will hopefully give scientists a better idea of how these atmospheric rivers form and over time give you enough warning to prepare for the coming storm.
Rainfall forecasting is tough, but the key point is that it doesn't take a lot to make a difference.
