a satellite mission to reveal the oceans’ impact on our weather and climate

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Science

Science Goals & Objectives

Science Goal

To reveal the impact of small-scale ocean features on large-scale weather and climate.

Science Objective 1

Determine the degree to which 25-km resolution turbulent heat and moisture fluxes influence midlatitude storm evolution and long-term weather.

Science Objective 2

Balance the global ocean turbulent heat and moisture flux contributions to the energy and water cycles to within 5%.

Mission Concept

A passive microwave radiometer measuring from 7-175 GHz

Butterfly Proposal

Science section

Butterfly Science

Fact Sheet

Butterfly Mission

Fact Sheet

Butterfly

Paper

Open Science

Sharing knowledge.

Coverage

sampling

About Us

Our science team is open source, open data, and open science. We are cloud-based and looking for community solutions to advance air-sea interactions research. We want to work with *you*!

About

Butterfly timeline

  • 2016

    Our Humble Beginnings

    Engineer cold emails scientist…want to meet at AGU and talk about science?

  • 2017

    Butterfly is born

    A virtual team is created, a lot of online brainstorming…what is interesting science with big societal impact?

  • image alt text

    2018

    Earth Venture Instrument - EVI5 - internal JPL competition

    We like your science, but, you are an EVM trying to fit into an EVI, patience young skywalker….

  • 2020

    Earth Venture Mission - 3 - NASA competition

    Drinking from a firehose. Electrical or chemical spacecraft propulsion? Rigid or deployable antenna? Science Tracability Matrix whaaaa??

  • 2021

    Earth Venture Mission - 3 - NASA competition - extended COVID version

    The competition just kept going and going because of COVID…. a millon details to keep track of… so so many zoom calls…. I think most of us can remember MEV Wet Mass and Power but sometimes forget our names.

  • Be Part
    of Our
    Story!

OUR AMAZING TEAM

Introducing....

Carol Anne Clayson

Principal Investigator

Aneesh Subramanian

Deputy Principal Investigator

Tony Lee

Project Scientist

Shannon Brown

Deputy Project Scientist & Instrument Scientist

Mark Bourassa

Co-Investigator - Lead Validation

Kelly Lombardo

Co-Investigator - Lead WRF modeling regional-scale

Rhys Parfitt

Co-Investigator - Lead observational analysis

Hyodae Seo

Co-Investigator - Lead WRF modeling basin-scale

Sarah Gille

Co-Investigator - Lead Science Objective 2

Tom Farrar

Co-Investigator - Lead analysis spatial effects

Brian Argrow

Co-Investigator - Lead Chrysalis Project (Student Collaboration)

Jeff Whitaker

Collaborator - Lead impact assessment in UFS

Daryl Kleist

Collaborator - Lead UFS assimilation

Jackie May

Collaborator - Lead NRL coupled modeling assimilation

Philip Browne

Collaborator - Lead ECMWF coupled modeling assimilation

Chris Harris

Collaborator - Lead UK Met Office modeling assimilation

Misako Kachi

Collaborator - Lead AMSR3 inter-cal/dev

Hiroyuki Tomita

Collaborator - Lead J-OFURO flux product

Abderrahim Bentamy

Collaborator - Lead IFREMER flux product

Experts in Oceanography, Meteorology, Satellites, Weather, and Open science!

Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Ball Aerospace
Florida State University
University of Colorado
Penn State University
Scripps Institute of Oceanography
NOAA
NRL
JAXA
ECMWF
UK Met Office
IFREMER
University of Nagoya
SpaceX
KSAT

Contact Us

nasa-butterfly@faralloninstitute.org