The Oklahoma-Texas Venue of the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry (DC3) Experiment

The field program of the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry (DC3) Experiment collected extensive data from airborne and ground-based instruments 15 May - 30 June 2012. Its goal was to provide the comprehensive data sets needed to improve understanding of the thunderstorm transport, production, and modification of chemical species affecting the upper troposphere and to improve understanding of electrification and lightning production in storms. Observations were collected in three venues (northern Alabama, Oklahoma - west Texas, and northeast Colorado), to provide a variety of storm and chemical environments for testing hypotheses and to improve the probability of observing suitable storms during the observational period. Because one goal was to quantify the contribution of lightning to NOX and ozone in the upper troposphere, all three venues had a ground-based VHF Lightning Mapping Array.

This paper focuses on the Oklahoma - west Texas venue. Platforms collecting data in this venue included the NSF/NCAR Gulfstream-V, the NASA DC-8, the DLR Falcon 20E, the Oklahoma – West Texas Lightning Mapping Array, two C-band mobile SMART-R radars (one polarimetric, one Doppler only), the NOAA mobile X-band polarimetric radar, the KOUN polarimetric WSR-88D prototype radar, the S-band National Weather Radar Testbed phased array radar, five operational WSR-88D radars (only one of which was polarimetric), a mobile environmental sounding system, and a mobile balloon-borne in-storm sounding system that launched an electric field meter, a precipitation particle imager, and standard GPS radiosondes. Mobile radars and the environmental sounding system operated on 13 missions, in-storm soundings were launched in 11 missions, and one or more aircraft flew 6 storm missions in this venue, with two additional downstream missions 24 hours later to study the evolving effects of photochemistry in the anvil remnant of Oklahoma - Texas storms. A wide variety of storm types was observed, including widespread weak storms, mesoscale convective systems, and five supercell storms. Some supercell storms were remarkable in having frequent, horizontally extensive lightning in their anvils. This paper presents an overview of the observing systems, with specific examples of lightning and in-storm ballooning data. Other papers at this conference focus on observations by the other mobile ground-based platforms.