Keynote Talk: Orographic Precipitation Process Studies: Recent Advances and Future Developments

This presentation will highlight observational analysis and associated numerical simulation results from field experiments conducted over the last 10-15 years that were aimed at improving our understanding of orographic precipitation processes. These projects include COAST (1993, 1995), CALJET (1998) and PACJET (2001), which focused on the Coastal Mountain ranges of Washington, Oregon and California, MAP (1999), which targeted the central European Alps, IPEX (2000), which collected data over the Wasatch Mountains of northeast Utah and IMPROVE (2001), which concentrated on the Oregon Cascades. These efforts have led to numerous publications in the peer-reviewed literature. The findings from these studies have raised a number of questions whose resolution requires new and improved datasets to be collected and analyzed. This presentation will discuss some of these issues and will outline two developing projects focused on the Sierra Nevada Mountains that aim to address these gaps: the Hydrometeorology Testbed (HMT) and the Sierra Hydrometeorology and Atmospheric River Experiment (SHARE).