Basic Convective and Mesoscale Research
Other Agency – Numerical Modeling Study of the Time-Dependent Behavior of Convection
Funding Agency: NSF
Objectives
Determine how environmental factors, notably the forcing that initiates
deep convection and the environmental wind and thermodynamic profiles,
control the time-dependent behavior of deep convective storms.
Accomplishments
This project is nearing completion - it involves the use of a 3-D cloud
model ARPI3 (similar to the ARPS model), developed by Dr. Daniel Weber
of CAPS. The aim has been to determine how environmental factors, notably
the forcing that initiates deep convection and the environmental wind
and thermodynamic profiles, control the time-dependent behavior of
deep convective storms. Simulation study results can be viewed at:
http://www.caps.ou.edu/~dweber/bubbles.html. Three Masters Theses were
produced from this work. 192 model runs have been completed and diagnosis
of the results has shown that the occurrence of sustained multicell
convection is quite sensitive to the initial CAPE and less so on the
shear. A measure of the behavior of the convection – the extent
to which the multicell updrafts are more plume-like or bubble-like – has
been developed. The frequency of new updraft regeneration also depends
on the CAPE and shear, with a strong sensitivity to the CAPE. In fall
2007, we plan to submit a renewal proposal to continue this work, to
include more simulations over a wider range of environmental conditions,
to fill in more of the multidimensional parameter space.
This project is ongoing.
Publications
Baranowski, B.C., C. A. Doswell, D.B. Weber, and A.M. Loftus, 2006: The
sensitivity of numerically simulated multicell convection to grid spacing
and computational missing coefficients. 23rd Conf. Severe Local Storms,
St. Louis, MO, Amer. Meteor. Soc., CD-ROM.
Loftus, A.M, C.A. Doswell III, D.B. Weber, and B.C. Baranowski, 2006: Parameterized mesoscale forcing mechanisms for initiating numerically-simulated isolated multicellular convection. 23rd Conf. Severe Local Storms, St. Louis, MO, Amer. Meteor. Soc., CD-ROM.