Identification

Title

Radar climatology of the COPS region

Abstract

A climatology of convection initiation (CI) and convective enhancements (CE) has been developed using radar reflectivity data in southwestern Germany and eastern France over the period of May–August of 2000–2006 and 2008. The study region included the Vosges Mountains of France, the Rhine Valley which straddles France and Germany, the Black Forest Mountains and the Swabian Mountains of Germany. Convection occurred frequently during the summer months throughout the study region. The CI density (number of initiations per square km) illustrates preferential formation in the mountain regions while the CE events spanned both mountains and valleys nearly equally. There is a strong mid-day peak of the CI events suggesting that diurnal heating is critical for CI in the region. The very strong thunderstorms (>46 dBZ) first occurred in the mountains and ∼2 h later in the Rhine Valley. During the summer of 2007, the Convective and Orographically-induced Precipitation Study (COPS) field campaign was conducted with the objective of obtaining improved understanding of convective processes and short-term quantitative precipitation forecasting in low-mountain regions. Comparisons were made between the radar climatology results and the COPS summer. The COPS summer exhibited preferential CI density in the mountainous regions but not as pronounced as the climatology. The COPS summer had a similar diurnal peak of CI events as climatology but the ratio of daytime to nighttime CI (1.7), or amplitude of the diurnal cycle, was less than that of climatology (3.0). While both the 8-year climatology and COPS summer were dominated by daytime, locally-forced CI occurrences, the broad distribution of daytime CI events and increase in nighttime events observed during COPS indicate a more active synoptic pattern in 2007.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7sj1n6q

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

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Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2011-02-04T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

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This is a preprint of an article published in Weckwerth, T. M., Wilson, J. W., Hagen, M., Emerson, T. J., Pinto, J. O., Rife, D. L. and Grebe, L. (2011), Radar climatology of the COPS region. Q.J.R. Meteorol. Soc., 137: 31–41. doi: 10.1002/qj.747

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact