Lynn McMurdie, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, introduces herself and the OLYMPEX field expedition in a new post on our Notes from the Field blog. "I live in Seattle, part of the Pacific Northwest in the NW corner of the continental United States. We have the reputation of being a very rainy place, but it’s nothing compared to the Olympic Peninsula, just to my immediate west," she wrote. "Starting next week, we begin the Olympic Mountain Experiment, or OLYMPEX. It is a NASA-led field campaign, which will take place from November 2015 through February 2016. The goal of the campaign is to collect detailed atmospheric measurements that will be used to evaluate how well rain-observing satellites measure rainfall and snowfall from space. In particular, OLYMPEX will be assessing satellite measurements made by the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission Core Observatory, a joint mission by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), which launched in 2014." The photo shows Joe Zagrodnik, a graduate student at University of Washington, on his way up to install instruments at one of the expedition's ground sites.

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