Breakout Summary Report
ARM/ASR User and PI Meeting
19 - 23 March 2018
Convective Processes Working Group
22 March 2018
1:45 PM - 3:45 PM
80
Adam Varble and Tony Del Genio
22 March 2018
1:45 PM - 3:45 PM
80
Adam Varble and Tony Del Genio
Breakout Description
This session overviewed the mission, objectives, and research themes of the Convective Processes Working Group and highlighted the ongoing relevant activities and research within ARM and ASR. The primary purpose of the session is to promote research collaboration on general topics of interest to ASR that require more work than individual PI grants.Main Discussion
The session started with a description of the Convective Processes Working Group that highlighted mission, objectives, and research themes. This was followed by presentations by breakout session leads that were relevant to the working group, which was a useful way to recap ongoing collaborative work within the ARM and ASR communities for everyone that may be interested in joining such efforts. These presentations were supposed to be limited to a couple of slides and less than 5 minutes, but, as often happens, most presenters talked well beyond their time limit.Following the short presentations, the working group translator (Scott Collis) gave a presentation on the role of the translator in interactions between ASR researchers and ARM infrastructure. Following this, the rest of the session was set aside for discussion. The following questions were posed to the audience:
1. Do the breakout sessions and research ongoing in ASR reflect overarching critical needs? Do upcoming field campaigns and IOPs?
2. Are there overlapping research areas that aren’t being exploited through collaboration? If so, what is needed to encourage greater collaboration toward achieving long-term objectives?
3. What observations/models are needed to make progress on identified critical questions and objectives? Are these provided by ARM? Are value-added products and data finding/downloading adequate?
Issues
We fell short on time to make sufficient progress on addressing group challenges or getting people to come together around specific research themes that could nucleate subgroups.Subgroup formation is hindered by the lack of focus groups that have regular breakout sessions at the meeting every year.
There continues to be a divide in opinions on the importance of aerosol effects on deep convection and whether this should be a programmatic focus relative to improved understanding and representation of deep convective systems with respect to thermodynamic and kinematic environmental conditions. Communication and cooperation between meteorological and cloud-aerosol interaction communities studying convection continues to need improvement, but the pathway for making this happen is unclear.
Needs
Convective cell tracking using the scanning precipitation radars is widely supported and deemed necessary for studying quickly evolving dynamical and microphysical processes that remain unconstrained in models. Developing an automated adaptive radar scanning algorithm for usage at the SGP and some AMF sites should be a goal. Given the workload of radar engineers, this may not happen until 2022.Large-scale forcing is seen as key to attracting the climate modeling community to be involved in using data from ARM field campaigns and for developing model intercomparison studies that tend to be very informative. Several members of the working group thought that the variational analysis should be a routine VAP and not be left as optional for a field campaign PI.
At the previous meeting, discussions mentioned that subgroups should form around common tools, data sets, and “fun” science because these naturally bring researchers together anyway. While it is natural to have groups working on a particular field campaign, the same is not necessarily true for general research topics or tools, where breakouts may vary from year to year. Subgroups are not only critical for making progress on larger programmatic goals, but attendees mentioned that they are also very helpful when advocating for ARM measurements and measurement strategies that can benefit individual PI projects.