Western Rains
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Heat water until you get vapor, force the vapor to rise until it cools and condenses into clouds, let the clouds steep until they're fully saturated - and voila! You've got rain. Hi! I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.

You've just heard the master recipe for rain. If you really want to delve into the intricacies of where, when and how much it will rain, you have to get inside the clouds and analyze them droplet by droplet.

That's exactly what research meteorologists at the University of Washington are doing in a three year study called the Improve Project. This past winter, every time a storm approached the coast of Washington, Improve Project scientists jumped in an instrument-laden turbo prop plane and took off into the teeth of it. Using digital cameras and lasers, they took photographs and shadow grams of cloud particles at every stage of their life cycle - from ice crystals a tenth the diameter of a human hair to rain drops as big as a pinkie toe nail. Never mind the gut-wrenching turbulence, the long hours of droning back and forth inside endless wads of rainbands, the occasional lightning strike, the inevitable bouts of air sickness. By the end of the winter, Improve researchers had they wanted: millions of digitally stored images of droplets.

Now comes the hard part: figuring out how to sort and analyze the data and eventually plug it into forecast models. If all goes according to plan, Puget Sound should start to see a dramatic improvement in rain and flood forecasts by the year 2004.

Thanks today go to Seattle writer, David Laskin. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory, supported by Subaru, the beauty of all-wheel drive.