Studies of Mesoscale Convective Systems

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Mesoscale convective systems (MCS) are collections of deep convective storms that are the parents of most beneficial rain and destructive severe weather in the Spring and Summer in the US. Improved understanding of these systems and their interactions with other scales of motion is fundamental to improve weather predictions sought after in the US Weather Research Program. Using data previously collected during the Oklahoma-Kansas Preliminary Regional Experiment for STORM Central (O-K PRE-STORM; where STORM stands for STormscale Operational and Research Meteorology), the Principal Investigator will investigate the structure and evolution of MCSs and how they affect the larger scale flow. The two major objectives are: (1) determine how the circulation structure of the stratiform regions of MCSs develops and how that may affect the structure and longevity of the parent convective system; (2) examine the structure of convective vertical drafts to determine how the area-averaged convective structure varies in space and time as a possible consequence of mesoscale gradients in the thermodynamic structure of the environment, and interaction between the convective region and internal mesoscale storm-relative flow.