Using Ground-Based Radar to Understand Entrainment in Deep Convection

The rapid growth of a thunderstorm includes a complex interplay between rising parcels of air in the interior of the storm and mixing processes that bring in environmental air from outside the cloud. This mixing process is called entrainment and is a key factor in regulating convective storms. This project will investigate several processes that are thought to control the amount of entrainment in thunderstorms, with an end goal of providing information to the numerical modeling community on how best to include entrainment in models. Improvement of processes in weather forecast models is important to public safety and national security, and the project will also provide workforce training through the mentorship of students and engage the public through outreach events at K-12 schools. Scientific understanding of how a cloud’s background environment and its organization interact to influence its entrainment rate remains incomplete. In this project, the research team will study four different hypotheses for environmental controls on cloud width and entrainment from prior literature, which were primarily derived based on theoretical and modeling studies. The overall objective of this project is to observationally validate the four hypotheses, to understand under which conditions each of these hypothesized controls on entrainment are valid, and to advance a unifying theory for the factors that influence entrainment. The project will make use of Large Eddy Simulation modeling, weather radar and satellite-derived databases for deep convective clouds, atmospheric reanalysis products, and satellite radar-derived echo top heights. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2614889 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: John Peters | Institution: Pennsylvania State Univ University Park, UNIVERSITY PARK, PA | Award Amount: $492,137 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2614889 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2614889.html