Analysis of the High-Resolution Mobile Mesonet Observations Collected during the 24 March 2023 Rolling Fork, Mississippi, Tornadic Supercell

On 24 March 2023, a supercell produced a high-end EF4 tornado that impacted Rolling Fork, Mississippi. The third intensive observing period (IOP 3) of the 2023 season of the Propagation, Evolution, and Rotation in Linear Storms (PERiLS) field campaign was ongoing in the Mississippi Delta and observed the near-storm environment and supercell evolution before and during the Rolling Fork tornado. The NOAA/OAR National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) Mobile Mesonets (MMs) collected high-resolution surface data in the forward-flank region of the supercell. In this presentation, we perform a storm-relative analysis of the NSSL MM dataset from the Rolling Fork supercell. Various features within the supercell – such as the left-flank convergence boundary (LFCB) and forward-flank convergence boundary (FFCB) – are identified and characterized by locally strong, baroclinically generated, streamwise vorticity normal to the MM motion and by gradients in virtual potential temperature and equivalent potential temperature following the MM motion. These MM observations are also analyzed with the C-band on Wheels (COW) radar data from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to help identify radar signatures that correspond to the identified supercell features. It was found that the identified supercell features were collocated with regions of high specific differential phase values along the edge of a differential reflectivity arc.