The North American Upstream Feature-Resolving and Tropopause Uncertainty Reconnaissance Experiment (NURTURE) is a NASA-funded large-scale aircraft field campaign that will take place in the winters of 2026 and 2027.
The overarching goal of NURTURE is to quantify the impact that perturbations poleward of the jet stream have on jet stream variability and high-impact weather (HIW) events. The Science Objectives are to advance the knowledge of:
NURTURE will emphasize the life cycles of mesoscale and synoptic-scale disturbances of Arctic origin and how their juxtaposition with mid-latitude features creates high-impact weather. It will also target measurements needed to reduce systematic process errors in numerical models within the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS) and maritime tropospheric regions in the vicinity of features responsible for HIW. The findings of NURTURE will be instrumental in improving the accuracy of numerical weather models and predicting high-impact weather events, thereby enhancing our ability to prepare for and respond to such events.
Visit: https://espo.nasa.gov/nurture for more information.
These are a series example analysis plots and forecasts maps that will be generated regularly to support the science goals of the NASA NURTURE mission and the January/February 2026 deployment based out of Goose Bay, NL, Canada.
Profs. Andrea Lopez Lang and Jonathan Martin are leading a team interested in obtaining observations that will help our understanding of how Arctic features known as tropopause polar vortices (TPVs) are guided towards and then interact with the jet stream to produce high impact weather. Both will spend about 2 weeks in the Goose Bay, NL, Canada in January and February 2026 along with AOS graduate student Flora Walchenbach executing the first field phase of the mission. In 2027, AOS graduate student Andrea Suarez Rosado will join for the second field phase.
Prof. Angela Rowe and collaborators at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center bring years of experience in planning and executing airborne field campaigns to obtain observations of mesoscale and microphysical processes in the extratropical atmosphere. As part of their project, AOS graduate student Ben Rodenkirch will spend 2 weeks in the Goose Bay during phase 1 of the campaign.
Prof. Tristan L'Ecuyer and SSEC's Tim Michaels are contributing PREFIRE satellite data and forecasting for aligning flight observations with PREFIRE satellite overpasses as part of this project. The data obtained by the aircraft support the verification efforts of satellite data. SSEC's Joe Taylor is the PI for the Scanning High-resolution Interferometer Sounder, one of the remote sensing instruments expected to be aboard the 777 in winter 2027.
The NURTURE campaign will be one of the U.S. contributions to an international period of intense observation of high-impact weather events. During the period of intense observations, U.S., Canadian, UK, German, French, Swiss, and Norwegian teams will coordinate to observe precursors features through their development into high impact weather events as they travel from North America across the Atlantic, into Europe. For more information about the international projects, visit: https://www.nawdic.kit.edu/62.php
This page is maintained by Andrea Lopez Lang at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.