Quantifying Aerosol Cloud Interactions through Tracking of Southeastern Storms and Environments

Understanding how deep convective storms respond to changes in aerosol is critical to elucidate how Earth’s changing climate will affect storms globally. This is especially true in understudied regions, including the Southeastern US. Quantifying this relationship between the local-scale thermodynamic and aerosol environment and convective clouds requires a high-resolution database of clouds identified and tracked through their lifetimes, along with information on the environmental and aerosol conditions that produced and sustained them. Here, we first use the open-source Tracking and Object-Based Analysis of Clouds library (tobac) to identify and track clouds using ground-based radar networks throughout the Southeastern US. After capturing this initial long-term database of clouds, we incorporate environmental information, where possible, from soundings, reanalysis, and field campaigns and super sites, such as the Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Mission (ARM) sites. For each identified convective storm, the database contains information on their formation environments (including convective available potential energy, wind shear, etc.), the evolution of these environments over time, and, where applicable, additional data from ground-based super sites and field campaigns. This comprehensive database of clouds and their environments has enabled us to examine, while holding the thermodynamic environment approximately constant, the impact of aerosol particles on deep convection where the data are available. In this presentation, we will discuss these new datasets, the methodology supporting their production, and the early scientific results on aerosol-cloud interactions from these new, detailed databases.