Airborne Measurements of the Nocturnal Low-level Jet and Wave Disturbances in the Stable Boundary Layer in PECAN (Plains Elevated Convection At Night)

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This award is for participation in the Plains Elevated Convection at Night (PECAN) field campaign. PECAN will take place in the central United States in the summer of 2015. The focus of the project is on overnight thunderstorm complexes that regularly occur in the Great Plains area. A variety of observational systems will be put in place for the field experiment including multiple aircraft, mobile radars, and ground-based systems that can profile the wind and particles in the lower atmosphere. This individual award provides funding for researchers to take part in the campaign and make use of data from the University of Wyoming King Air (UWKA) research aircraft. The UWKA will sample the near-surface environment near thunderstorm complexes and areas of anticipated thunderstorm development in order to better understand the triggers and forcing mechanisms that help these complexes survive. This project will help to increase understanding of these convective systems in order to better predict and warn the public of hazardous weather. The project will also help to train the future generation of scientists by involving multiple graduate students in the research.The steering committee for the PECAN campaign has identified four main research topics to be addressed: 1) Nocturnal convection initiation and early evolution of mesoscale convective clusters; 2) Bore and other wave-like disturbances; 3) Dynamics and microphysics of nocturnal mesoscale convective systems; 4) Prediction of nocturnal convection initiation and evolution. This research under this award will help to address each of these topics. The project will document the structure, properties and evolution of bores and solitons in unprecedented detail, gain insight in the behavior of bores/solitons in the context of the observed ambient stability and shear profiles, and to examine their role in convective initiation. An associated project goal is to study the mesoscale kinematics and dynamics of the nocturnal low level jet over the Great Plains.