 Picon stands for the Plains Elevated Convection at Night Project. Most storms at night are initiated several thousand feet above the Earth's surface, where there are fewer observations and limited understanding of the atmosphere. The ultimate objective of Picon is to better understand and forecast these challenging nighttime thunderstorms. Nighttime thunderstorms are very different breeds than daytime thunderstorms. One of the features that occur during nighttime storms is an external stable surface layer due to the cooling that occurs at the ground. Another ingredient that occurs at night is the low-level jet. This is a ribbon of strong winds that occurs about a thousand feet above the ground and brings warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico northward into the region of Picon and may feed the thunderstorms in the area. Another big unknown is why the first storms that form sometimes grow into large mesoscale convective systems covering 25,000 square miles or more. And other times the early storms simply dissipate or fall apart. Additionally, there may be nocturnal atmospheric perturbations such as boars or other elevated wave-like features that create updrafts and these may initiate and maintain storms. We've been preparing for Picon for at least four years now. It started with a handful of scientists coming together to discuss the problem of understanding and forecasting nighttime thunderstorms and it evolved and expanded from there to a full, huge field campaign that we're really excited that's happening this summer in the central U.S. So we've put together a wide variety of various instruments and scientists that are coming together to study various components of nighttime thunderstorms. We'll have over 100 instruments out there for Picon. This includes mobile radars, mobile-sounding systems, and profiling systems that continually measure the temperature, winds, and moisture throughout the lowest levels of the atmosphere. We also have a fixed network of instruments including the S-Pull radar. S-Pull is a transportable radar that was uniquely designed to be able to be taken apart and stored in seven C containers. Those C containers have been shipped all over the world. We hope that we'll get the mobile instruments into the proper locations prior to sunset and they'll continue to operate there all night long, collecting observations of the storms that may form or move overhead. Ideally they'll collect measurements of high winds and heavy rain, maybe even hail. Now in the event that there's a threat of a tornado, that's when we would move the people and their instruments out of harm's way. I'm most looking forward to seeing the data. It's just fun to go out into the field and see the data that's collected in real time and start to get ideas about what's happening in the atmosphere that leads to these sometimes severe storms. After the project we'll start presenting results and conferences and we'll have science team meetings where all of the Picon participants will come together with their data sets and we'll start the exciting phase of collaborations and bringing all the various data sets together to really get a complete picture of the atmosphere. So we're really excited about Picon and the great potential for improving our understanding of nighttime thunderstorms and also to improve their forecast skill and weather warnings.