Fieldwork across U.S. supports NASA’s INCUS satellite mission to study severe storms
Published: March 5, 2026 11:45 AM
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Colorado State University researchers are conducting a series of field campaigns to prepare for NASA’s upcoming satellite mission into severe weather formation, scheduled to launch no earlier than 2027.
The Investigation of Convective Updrafts mission, or INCUS, is led by CSU and will use three small satellites to measure vertical air motion inside storms from space. That process is key to severe weather formation, including heavy rain and damaging winds. Recent field campaigns by the Calibration and Validation team in Colorado, Alabama and Oklahoma tested weather forecasting systems in various configurations, combinations and conditions to collect information on how a storm’s vertical air motion and inner structure changes over time. The pre-mission work builds understanding of severe storm dynamics and improves radar tracking algorithms ahead of launch – ensuring the unique, top-down data eventually collected by the team of satellites is accurate.
The INCUS mission is focused on convective mass flux, or the vertical transport of air and water in tropical storms. This process quickly moves water, energy and air from the surface of the Earth into the upper atmosphere, driving storms and associated extensive anvil clouds. Life on Earth is fundamentally linked to the formation of these storms because of the fresh water they supply and the severe weather they can generate. Yet understanding of them lags because of a lack of global observations that would help predict storm intensity and how this varies from region to region, including over land versus over ocean.
The mission – led by researchers in CSU’s Department of Atmospheric Science – addresses this gap by using multiple Ka-band radar and radiometer-equipped satellites. These satellites will provide an unprecedented 3D view of storms as they continually fly over them in a time span of less than 2 minutes. By measuring how the radar signal changes from one satellite to another, and from one pass to the next, scientists can better estimate how strong the upward motion of air is inside storms.
Scientists have never collected systematic, global measurements of such processes because the miniaturization of instruments necessary to fly these combined sensors in a train of small satellites has not existed until now. That means the satellites will provide a new and innovative set of tools previously unavailable to the scientific community.
That is where the field campaigns come in, said CSU Research Scientist Brenda Dolan.
“Ultimately, we are trying to build a statistical database of what updrafts look like. That will help the team build confidence in our overall approach with INCUS,” she said. “The field campaigns help us make useful comparisons from the ground to the huge amounts of data we will soon be collecting across many different environments from space. We are currently focused on assembling the different radar systems and frequencies, as well as new storm tracking tools, to build the database needed to compare with INCUS observations.”
She added that while the work is key to the success of the INCUS mission, their findings will also support broader, fundamental science related to severe weather. That includes reducing errors in forecasting models over a range of timescales and developing a greater understanding of how aerosols, such as wildfire smoke, are lifted into the atmosphere.
Combining tools to improve understanding of severe weather dynamics
INCUS satellites will carry about a human’s weight in sensitive instrumentation: radars, antennas, batteries and other hardware as they fly over the rain, hail and lightning-laden storms in the tropics.
While these tiny marvels will be packed with useful equipment, their inherent space constraints, novel design and new mission approach built around rapid scanning mean they will provide information that does not neatly align with that currently collected by the larger permanent ground-based weather radar systems seen around the world today.
Complicating matters further, the satellites will frequently sample remote regions over tropical oceans and land areas – far from infrastructure that could be used to confirm their findings.
With that in mind, the team spent several months each year in 2024 and 2025 tracking storms in Colorado, Oklahoma and Alabama. While none of those locations will exactly replicate the ocean environments INCUS will most often encounter, they provide a window into storm dynamics across a variety of conditions and with great access to weather infrastructure. They also ensure important validation of the INCUS approach by linking changes in radar reflectivity to vertical transport.
Dolan and CSU Associate Professor Kristen Rasmussen co-led the Colorado campaign along the Front Range with support from undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and research staff at CSU. At the heart of the effort was the large, CSU-CHIVO radar system operated by University Distinguished Professor V. Chandrasekar’s research group and an auto-detection tracking technology developed by Professor Pavlos Kollias’ group at Stony Brook University called Multisensor Agile Adaptive Scanning, or MAAS. The MAAS system tracks convective storms – estimating the trajectory of storm cells to automatically direct radar scanning.
Weather radar systems broadly work by sending out pulses of energy and measuring the returning wave that bounces back off objects, such as ice or hail in the atmosphere. CHIVO uses a longer C-band wavelength to return big-picture information from deep inside of a storm with its 14-foot antenna. That differs from the smaller, shorter wavelength Ka-band radar systems on the INCUS satellites that are instead more sensitive to small particles like ice crystals and will be constantly sampling the upper levels of clouds as they fly over storms.
Dolan said groundwork in Colorado helped establish ways to speed up tracking of storms by systems like CHIVO to match INCUS sampling rates, while also providing valuable points of reference with the differences in radar systems.
“Manually identifying and tracking updrafts with ground radars is often challenging, so we wanted to test and use the MAAS framework to understand how to improve early detection of storms and how we can automate systems to track storms of interest – not only better but faster,” Dolan said.
The team also used weather ballons as well as snow-level and micro rain radar systems for further validation, she said.
Sean Freeman co-led the Alabama campaign, which ran through 2025 during the often-destructive spring tornado season. An assistant professor at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, he earned his Ph.D. from CSU in 2022, which is where he started working on the INCUS project.
He said the Alabama campaign worked in the same way as Colorado, with a slightly different set of tools, including phased array radars. The military originally used these systems to track fast-moving planes; the beams emitting from them can be tuned and adjusted without physically moving the system, in contrast to conventional radar systems. That means they can be pointed straight up into a storm above – potentially offering a valuable bottom-up view to pair with what INCUS will see top down.
“These are relatively new systems for weather tracking that we deployed with our partners at Stony Brook. We combined them with conventional radars and other tools to track storms and see directly up into them when they moved over,” Freeman said. “They are advanced tools that are new for this kind of research. So, we spent a lot of time understanding the types of data they could provide and then developing the code and approaches we need to best get and use it.”
He also stressed that an important part of the calibration effort was collecting data from different types of storms.
“The more humid conditions found in Alabama influence storm formation in a different way from the dry atmosphere of Colorado. That provides an opportunity to make a more comprehensive database – since we can’t bring these systems out into the ocean where we would really want to be,” he said. “The goal is to develop a blueprint to quickly and reliably capture vertical motions across the variety of storms INCUS will encounter – building the best data set we can to inform operations and build trust in what it can provide when it is up and running.”
INCUS mission is full of partnerships and builds on extensive expertise in remote sensing
The INCUS mission is led by Susan van den Heever, a University Distinguished Professor at CSU. The work builds on her own and the university’s extensive expertise and heritage in remote sensing, satellite development, and cloud and storm science through the departments of Atmospheric Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering within the Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering. That includes highly successful past partnerships with NASA around the CloudSat and TEMPEST-D weather research projects, which had related scientific objectives.
Several NASA centers are involved in the INCUS mission, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center and Marshall Space Flight Center. Meanwhile, in Colorado, independent companies Blue Canyon Technologies and Tendeg LLC have made the satellite and instrument components. CU Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics will also be assisting with mission operations. The science research team for the mission also includes several university partners at City College of New York, Stony Brook University, Texas A&M University, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, UCLA, the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Van den Heever said the mission is a truly interdisciplinary effort.
“Our team features talented scientists, engineers and researchers from many of the leading storm research institutions – each specialists in their particular aspects of the field,” she said. “Together, we hope that the INCUS mission can addresses a key gap in understanding severe weather, generating critical information that will help communities better prepare for impacts of such storms both now and in the future.”
Rasmussen is a CSU faculty member and part of the INCUS leadership team. She added that these field campaigns increase confidence in the measurements INCUS will soon return from space and continue the broad work the university has done in this area for decades.
“While life on Earth is fundamentally connected to the internal processes seen in convective storms, our understanding is still constrained,” she said. “These pre-launch field campaigns provide foundational information and testing of observational strategies that will allow our team to effectively validate INCUS observations after launch. INCUS Calibration and Validation efforts include a large team of expert scientists and will broadly ensure the products are useful to the research community.”
She said the primary Calibration and Validation team efforts will occur after INCUS launches.
“We look forward to implementing lessons learned from these pre-launch campaigns in building a robust post-launch field campaign in the subtropical location of Key West, Florida and other locations,” she said.