Observing Storm and PBL Interactions with Airborne Raman Lidar during PECAN

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. During the PECAN (Plains Elevated Convection At Night) field campaign 2015, a compact Raman lidar (CRL) system was successfully deployed on University Wyoming King Air (UWKA). 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 development stages on July 1st, 2015 will be provided to illustrate rapidly changing structures of MCS inflow and interactions of cold pool outflow with environmental inflow. Observations of a convective initiation triggered by the outflow boundary of an MCS on June 8th, 2015 highlight the importance of fine-scale storm and environment interactions.