EAGER: Novel Applications of Mobile Observational Strategies to Non-Severe Atmospheric Scenarios

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The National Science Foundation uses the Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) funding mechanism to support exploratory work in its early stages on untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas or approaches. This EAGER project was awarded as a result of the invitation in the Dear Colleague Letter NSF 16-080 to proposers from Historically Black Colleges and Universities to submit proposals that would strengthen research capacity of faculty at the institution. The project at Jackson State University seeks to collect multi-scale meteorological data with mobile observing systems and perform the data analysis of atmospheric environments at scales never before sampled. The project provides research experiences for undergraduate students. This project is funded by the Division of Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research in the Directorate for Geosciences.This project seeks to substantially expand the realm of applications for mobile observations to geographic and phenomenological settings that essentially remain "unexplored territory" at scales that are unsampled by fixed in situ observing systems. Because mobile observations sampled at high frequency can readily detect spatial variations on scales ranging from tens of meters to hundreds of kilometers regardless of cloud or precipitation conditions, they can uniquely fill in gaps between fixed stations in order to bridge atmospheric scales from microscale to synoptic scale. The research will conduct and analyze a wide variety of mobile transects in all seasons and in collaboration with researchers at with University of Missouri at Columbia. Cases are expected to focus on baroclinic zones, moisture boundaries, and microscale variability. Primary raw data products will be temperature and humidity sampled at 2 second intervals. The surface transects will be supplemented where appropriate with lower tropospheric radiosonde launches.