Matching Overshooting Storms with Nearby Radiosondes to Analyze Near-Storm Environment

Dynamics and Chemistry of the Summer Stratosphere (DCOTSS) is a NASA field campaign to investigate transport of water vapor and other chemicals into the stratosphere by deep convection in the contiguous United States. One mechanism for this transport is overshooting convective storms that break the tropopause and enter the lower stratosphere. The goal of this specific project is to match overshooting storms with a nearby radiosonde in order to provide the environmental conditions leading to the overshooting events. This project utilizes the GridRAD radar-based dataset of deep convection to identify overshooting events from July-August 2021 and May-July 2022, which overlaps the DCOTSS field measurements. The GridRAD data were filtered to include the contiguous United States east of the Rockies to avoid terrain complications. Then, the data were sorted by location and time in order to match overshoot events to a representative radiosonde. To ensure the radiosonde is representative there will be a manual check of the matched data, criteria for the manual check is currently being tested. Preliminary results of matched data will be presented. We will compare distributions of GridRAD-derived overshooting top characteristics to sounding-derived parameters from the radiosonde data. In the future, this dataset can be used to establish the best predictors for aspects of overshooting tops like depth, width, and longevity so that their impact on the transport of water vapor into the stratosphere can be better incorporated into climate simulations. This could improve our understanding and prediction of the impacts of overshooting convection on climate.