A161-01
Perspectives on deep convective updraft modes using multi-sensor remote sensing data from RELAMPAGO-CACTI
Monday, 14 December 2020: 10:03
Virtual
Stephen W Nesbitt1, Lina Esther Rivelli-Zea2, Maxwell Grover1, Robert Jeffrey Trapp3, Adam Varble4, V. V Chandrasekar5, Ivan H Arias6, Timothy J Lang7 and Kristopher M Bedka8, (1)University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Urbana, IL, United States, (2)University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Atmospheric Sciences, Urbana, IL, United States, (3)Dept Earth & Atmospheric Scien, West Lafayette, IN, United States, (4)Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, United States, (5)Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, United States, (6)Colorado State University, Fort Collins, United States, (7)NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL, United States, (8)NASA Langley Research Center, Climate Science Branch, Hampton, VA, United States
Abstract:
Recent studies have attempted to characterize dynamical modes of deep convective updrafts, whether they be variants of turbulent plumes, thermals, or slabs. These different updraft modes have variable dynamical structures that impact key physical processes including precipitation and anvil formation, radiative and latent heating distributions, entrainment rates, momentum transports, and hazardous weather. Observational evidence favors the former two modes in isolated cellular storms (individual cumulonimbi, supercell, unorganized multi-cell) while the latter is more likely in storms with organized cold pools such as quasi-linear convective systems. While radar presentations of convective storm morphology are well characterized, the presentation of individual updraft characteristics, particularly at high time resolution, in multi-sensor data is less well characterized.
The nature of these various types of convective updrafts are hypothesized to have characteristic spatio-temporal properties that are observable in remote sensing data. During RELAMPAGO-CACTI, high time resolution scans from ground-based Doppler dual-polarization radar that provide the structural and temporal continuity of specific differential phase and differential reflectivity columns in the context of single and multiple-Doppler kinematic retrievals, 1-minute satellite observed overshooting tops, and continuous total lightning data from space and ground-based networks that include a lightning mapping array are available for a number of deep convective cases. In this presentation, the high spatial and temporal information contained within each of these observation types is used to contrast observed convective updraft modes and their near-storm environments for several different case morphologies observed during RELAMPAGO-CACTI.
