Estimates of the vertical profile of entrainment rate from millimeter-wavelength radar observations

 
Poster PDF

Authors

Michael Jensen — Brookhaven National Laboratory
Tami Fairless — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Pavlos Kollias — Stony Brook University
Chunsong Lu — Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology
Tim Wagner — University of Wisconsin, Madison

Category

Cloud Properties

Description

Mixing of environmental air with buoyant plumes has important implications on cloud life cycle and subsequent impacts on the atmospheric energy and water budgets. This mixing is notoriously difficult to measure, particularly from a remote sensing point of view. Here we introduce a technique using velocity profiles from an ARM vertically pointing millimeter-wavelength cloud radar and estimates of the cloud adiabaticity in order to estimate a vertical profile of entrainment rate for shallow cumulus clouds.