Lessons from subVORTEX RFD (summer 98) relative
to TIMEx:
- the relevant physical scales of organization of convective initiation
may be even smaller than expected, on the order of 10’s of meters; see
Erik Rasmussen’s web site for examples: http://mrd3.mmm.ucar.edu/~eras/www/MyPage/DCVZ/dcvz.html
- given the potential importance of relatively small physical scales
of organization of water vapor, it became clear that an aircraft-mounted
scanning system (moving at 100 ms-1) would not be able to resolve such
small scales; accordingly, our focus shifted away from the development
of airborne scanning DIAL, to a ground-based system;
- fast moving boundaries are extremely difficult to observe from the
ground;
- better communications are essential, both between teams and with data
sources;
- need to improve ability to coordinate multiple mobile platforms;
- easy to find null cases of convective initiation, very difficult to
find initiation;
- expect to spend 12000 miles to document 6 boundaries;
- no substitute for the human eye in detecting initiation (30 min. faster).
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