Forecasting Exercise Begins Oklahoma Storm Study Count Down

 
Published: 9 March 2011

Clouds like this, called by the name "anvil" for its shape, are one type of cloud system researchers hope to encounter during MC3E.Beginning April 2011, the ARM Southern Great Plains (SGP) site in north-central Oklahoma will host the first major field campaign to take advantage of numerous new radars and other remote sensing instrumentation installed throughout the site with funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Midlatitude Continental Convective Clouds Experiment (MC3E) will use two aircraft and a comprehensive array of ground-based instruments within and around the SGP site to obtain detailed 3D measurements of storm systems. With less than two months until the campaign begins, scientists funded by NASA and DOE met at the SGP site in late February to iron out the remaining details related to aircraft operations and to conduct a forecasting exercise to simulate the decisions that will need to be made on a typical operational day.

As described in this ARM Facility News article, MC3E is highly complex, involving five remote radiosonde sites, supplemental radars, coordinated aircraft, and a dense network of dozens of rain gauges and disdrometers. Beginning with an overview of the various campaign components, the team discussed: SGP site operations and logistics, real-time data visualization for directing field operations, radar scanning strategies, and NASA flight plans. The team agreed to locate the campaign’s operations center at the SGP Central Facility and to use two mission scientists and a dedicated pilot’s liaison to guide operations each day. They then reviewed various forecast scenarios and the process for determining the appropriate plan for each day to support the achievable science objectives.

While the observational strategies developed for MC3E allow for a great deal of flexibility, the “dream scenario” would capture the propagation and development of a storm system within the study domain. Centered on the SGP Central Facility and bordered by the new ARM precipitation radars, NASA aircraft would fly above and within the clouds overhead while NASA radar systems would scan vertically through the storm along the aircraft flight tracks. At the same time, a disdrometer network would measure variability in precipitation at the surface. This dream scenario would record all the motions within the storm, the characteristics of the cloud and precipitation particles, and a detailed data set of the environment within which the storm exists.

Several team members followed up at the National Weather Center in Norman, Okla., the next day to discuss forecasting support from the National Weather Service Forecast Office and the NOAA Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL). Forecasters and modelers from these institutions will provide important guidance and local expertise for MC3E forecast operations. In addition, MC3E research collaborations with NSSL and University of Oklahoma School of Meteorology scientists were explored in the areas of radar meteorology and convective storm modeling.