Tracking convective cell life cycle properties to evaluate models

Description

The Cloud, Aerosol, and Complex Terrain Interactions (CACTI) field campaign routinely observed initiating, growing, and decaying convective cells of varying scale with scanning radars and satellite measurements within the context of continuous environmental thermodynamic, kinematic, and aerosol observations. Such a dataset presents unique opportunities to (i) robustly characterize relationships between convective cloud life cycles and their surrounding environment with which they interact, and (ii) evaluate how well models reproduce observed relationships. We examine the microphysical and macrophysical life cycles of convective cells that are individually tracked in time using 15-minute surveillance scans from the C-band radar as they initiate, grow, merge, split, and decay. A range of radar variable, retrieval, and cloud top statistics are saved for each cell using C-band radar surveillance scans, GOES-16 satellite retrievals, and hemispheric RHIs from the X- and C-band radars that slice through the cells and have much higher vertical resolution. The same cell tracking method and the same cell statistics are accumulated for a regional, convection-permitting Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) simulation covering the entire CACTI experiment. Impacts of convective cell lifetime, life cycle stage, merging, and ambient environmental conditions on cell microphysical and macrophysical evolution are evaluated and compared between observations and model output.