NASA Testing What Happens When Ice Gets In Jet Engines
Did you know that airplane jet engines can lose power and suffer damage when they ingest ice crystals suspended in clouds? Or that icing formation inside turbine engines has never been demonstrated in a full-scale test?
Fear not, because NASA aeronautics researchers are now on it. For the first time ever, this month they are investigating ice crystal accretion inside a test engine at the agency’s Glenn Research Center.
February 27th, 2013
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Smartphone Barometric Pressure App Could Improve Weather Forecasts
University of Washington atmospheric scientists are paddling in to the citizen science crowdsourcing wave.
They’ve released a free Android app called pressureNET for tablets and smartphones to collect and map barometric pressure data around the world. They hope to improve short-term, local weather forecasting with the flood of new readings.
PressureNET, now installed on more than 10,000 devices, makes use of pressure sensors built into a growing number of smartphones and tablets. The newest version of the app provides a lives stream of data to scientists and forecasters.
“With this approach we could potentially have tens or hundreds of thousands of additional surface pressure observations, which could significantly improve short-term weather forecasts,” says Cliff Mass, a UW atmospheric sciences professor.
February 8th, 2013
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