The Midlatitude Continental Convective Clouds Experiment (MC3E) sounding network: operations, processing and analysis

[摘要] The Midlatitude Continental Convective Clouds Experiment (MC3E) took placeduring the spring of 2011 centered in north-central Oklahoma, USA. The maingoal of this field campaign was to capture the dynamical and microphysicalcharacteristics of precipitating convective systems in the US Central Plains. Amajor component of the campaign was a six-site radiosonde array designed tocapture the large-scale variability of the atmospheric state with the intentof deriving model forcing data sets. Over the course of the 46-day MC3Ecampaign, a total of 1362 radiosondes were launched from the enhanced sondenetwork. This manuscript provides details on the instrumentation usedas part of the sounding array, the data processing activities includingquality checks and humidity bias corrections and an analysis of the impactsof bias correction and algorithm assumptions on the determination ofconvective levels and indices. It is found that corrections for knownradiosonde humidity biases and assumptions regarding the characteristics ofthe surface convective parcel result in significant differences in thederived values of convective levels and indices in many soundings. Inaddition, the impact of including the humidity corrections and qualitycontrols on the thermodynamic profiles that are used in the derivation of alarge-scale model forcing data set are investigated. The results show asignificant impact on the derived large-scale vertical velocity fieldillustrating the importance of addressing these humidity biases.

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