Improving Vertical Velocity Retrievals from Doppler Radar Observations of Convection

University Of Oklahoma Norman Campus, Norman OK

Investigators

Abstract

Weather radars have a variety of functions, from sensing severe weather to providing estimates of rainfall. One of the main duties of Doppler radar is to retrieve the horizontal wind field. However, in meteorology it is very important to know the vertical winds to determine how quickly air is rising or descending. Radar meteorologists have used a variety of methods to estimate vertical winds from radar data, but there is room for improvement. The researchers in this project will develop advanced techniques to improve analysis of the three dimensional wind field. The new techniques will benefit research studies on severe weather topics such as supercell thunderstorms and tornadoes as well as potentially improving the initialization of numerical weather models. The project will also help to train the next generation of scientists by including students in the data analysis. The research team will address several long-standing issues related to the processing and utilization of radar meteorology products. This award is focused on minimizing the errors due to non-simultaneous data collection and the derivation of vertical velocity from radar measurements. Data will be collected from a variety of radar and profiler systems at the Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement site in Oklahoma to address the following research tasks: 1) Designing a new spatially-variable advection-correction/analysis procedure to reduce errors in radial wind analyses, 2) Investigating the utility of the anelastic vertical vorticity equation as a constraint in variational dual-Doppler wind analysis, and 3) Investigating the advantages and disadvantages of ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) wind analysis versus variational dual-Doppler wind analysis.