Local Environmental Controls on the Early Stages of Convective Cloud Development Over the Southeast U.S

The initiation and evolution of convection may depend on local thermodynamics that are hard to observe from space and/or ground. If small spatial scale perturbations are important, convection--environment relationships derived from larger-scale gridded products (such as reanalyses or coarse-gridded satellite products) may be misleading, or weaker than actually occurring in nature. In this presentation, we perform a version of tracking to isolate the first appearance and early stages of deep convection. Using new higher spatial resolution temperature and water vapor data from satellite products, we investigate the spatial scales for which buoyancy exists prior to convection initiation, and assess to what extent local environments remain unstable or are stabilized as convection evolves. We perform our analysis during low-shear summertime-seasons over the southeastern U.S., where environments are often characterized by varying terrain and land-surface complexity and local environments may be more strongly influenced by surface properties. Strong surface-atmosphere-cloud interactions are one reason the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Mobile Facility (AMF) is being deployed to Bankhead National Forest in northern Alabama. Increasing our understanding of the land-atmosphere interactions within the context of convective onset and initial-stage development is important for improving our understanding of what drives convective diurnal cycles and convective-driven clouds, as well as what local features should be regularly considered for understanding when and where convection initiates over larger land domains.