Case: 16 February 2018

Summary

Open cell event following frontal passage during the ACE-ENA campaign

Description

This was an open cell cumulus case that followed a frontal passage the previous day. The event occurred during the ACE-ENA campaign, and featured a G-1 afternoon aircraft mission that was targeting open clouds to the north of the site (February 15th). The aircraft collected several legs through a relatively reasonable open cloud field. Persistent upper-level clouds over the domain throughout the event associated with the previous day’s wave. The melting level was near or below 2.0 km AGL throughout both days, noting deeper and precipitating open cell cloud tops reached to as high as 3 km towards the later parts of the day on 15 February. Low-level winds were light and primarily from the north.

Available assets

Standard ARM profiling assets, SEVIRI. ACE-ENA campaign day, which includes 4 radiosonde launches, SACR, XSAPR (operational after 15 UTC), RLPROF-FEX, ARM AAF Gulfstream-1 (G-1) on the 15th.

Critical period: 03:00-10:00

Episodic open cell cumulus passing over the ENA site

Figure 30 True color afternoon MODIS AQUA image with overlaid LES domains. The image domain corresponds to the size of the model forcing domain.