Observing PBL Structures around Storms with Airborne Raman Lidar

To improve forecasting of severe weather, better observations of PBL structure around convective storms are needed because storm-environment interactions directly impact convective cloud evolution. However, near storm PBL structures are challenging to observe. Airborne Raman lidar can simultaneously provide aerosol, water vapor, and temperature structures in the PBL, thus offer a new way to observe PBL structure around storms. A compact Raman lidar (CRL) system was successfully deployed on University Wyoming King Air (UWKA) during the PECAN (Plains Elevated Convection At Night) field campaign 2015 and NOAA P-3 aircraft during VORTEX-SE 2018. Together with in situ measurements, CRL provides measurements to characterize rapid changing storm environments, especially combined with radar observed storm structure and dynamics. PBL structure variations observed at different MCS or supercell development stages will be provided to illustrate rapidly changing structures of storm inflow and interactions of cold pool outflow with environmental inflow.