May 3 case
Description
- Clear skies transitioning to shallow cumulus, some cirrus
- G1 sampled from 1058 to 1448 LT
Central Facility sounding
Early morning
- CAPE: 0.0 J/kg, CIN: 0.0 J/kg, LCL: 954.33 hPa, LFC: NA
- Strong inversion at 900 hPa level, and generally stable layer between ~850 and 650 hPa
- Moist boundary layer and dry layer between 800 and 700 hPa level
Around noon
- CAPE: 297.3 J/kg, CIN: 0.0 J/kg, LCL: 822.07 hPa, LFC: 816.99 hPa
- Low-level dry layer (850-600 hPa) has disappeared; now a surface parcel has some CAPE
- Still calm wind within and right above the PBL, up to ~ 3 m/s
CTP-HIlow diagram
- Most of the areas in the domain has unstable but too dry low-level atmosphere in the morning. Some areas are not too dry, so surface sensible or latent heat flux may enhance chance of moist convection. Higher sensible heat flux may be able to raise the PBL height sufficiently high for PBL air parcels to reach LFC, or surface moisture flux may be able to moisten the low-level atmosphere enough to lower LFC.
MODIS Terra image and G1 flight routes
GOES visible reflectance snap shots from late morning to afternoon
GOES vs WRF timeseries comparison from late morning to afternoon
Inner-domain average of short-wave reflectance
Comparing WRF (ratio of SWUPT/SWDNT) and GOES (post-processed to 5-km grid over SGP)
-
Fraction of non-missing data across the inner domain
-
Inner-domain average SW reflectance
Inner-domain average Liquid Water Path
-
Fraction of non-missing data across the inner domain
-
Inner-domain average LWP
-
Inner-domain average cloud fraction (fraction of grid columns with LWP > 1.0 g/m2)
