Sunday, March 15, 2015

TTUKa radar update

Yesterday and today have both been excellent for clear air data collection. On 14 March, the TTUKa radar team began coordinated scanning around 20:17 UTC. We did coordinated RHIs from 0-10 degree in elevation such that the intersection point was about 100 m (200 m) southeast of the lidar supersite (BAO tower). We collected approximately 45 minutes of virtual tower data. At 21:11:00 UTC we implemented a dual-Doppler stare at 150 m AGL over the intersection point defined by the virtual towers. We did this to mimic the concurrent 150 m stare by HRDL over the lidar supersite from 21:00 through 22:00 UTC. We collected ray data at 2 Hz and terminated the stare at ~22:17 UTC.  We then did 20 degree dual-Doppler volumes (8 tilts corresponding to the 6 tower levels plus 350 and 400 m ) for approximately an hour. The revisit time for each volume was ~ 9 seconds.  Finally, we collected another hour of coordinated RHIs from 23:38 to 00:38 UTC.

The coherency was decent through the majority of data collection, but there were still pockets of noise. Also, wind speeds were painfully light...according to the tower, the wind speeds were below 4 m/s for the majority of the time period. Nonetheless, a good clear dataset has been collected.

We scanned 569 minutes yesterday bringing the project total to 1893 / 7200 minutes.

We are still in the field taking measurements (as of 00:45 16 March UTC).  Data preliminarily have been of better quality today. Also, the wind speeds were higher (within the 4 - 8 m/s range). We didn't do any stares today, but focused on virtual towers and dual-Doppler volumes instead. More updates to come.

Anticipating similar conditions tomorrow, we plan to get out to the field early to attempt to observe the transition from the morning to afternoon boundary layer. We are also expecting precipitation Wednesday and Thursday. We'll see how that evolves.

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