Effects of Tropical Mesoscale Convective Systems on the Boundary Layer and the Larger Scale

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9706098 Lewis TOGA-COARE (for Tropical Ocean-Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean- Atmosphere Response Experiment) was a observational field project conducted in the warm pool area of the western tropical Pacific Ocean. Some of the observations span several years in the early 1990s. Most are derived from an intensive observing period of 4 months in winter, 1993. It was a joint ocean/atmosphere project with the focused goal of collecting the observations relevant to air-sea interactions and the physical processes that couple the ocean and atmosphere in the region of the world. One of the objectives of the TOGA-COARE is to determine the principal atmospheric processes that organize convection in the Western Pacific warm pool region. To accomplish this objective, the Principal Investigator will derive vertical motions, momentum transports, and heat budgets for different types of oceanic mesoscale convective systems (MCSs). She will relate these physical quantities to different characteristics of mesoscale convective systems (MCS) including the modes of convection, evolution and boundary layer modification. The research will focus on the combined use of in situ and Doppler radar measurements from multiple aircraft including the use of a relatively new Doppler synthesis technique, quad- Doppler. Four distinct cases (Feb. 6, Feb. 9, Feb. 20, Feb. 22) have been chosen for comparison. Each of the four systems represent different types of MCS organizational structure. The exceptional quality of the winds, due to the quad- Doppler technique, will be an asset for calculating the heat flux. The impact of the different types of MCSs on the larger scale structure will be examined. ***