Structure of Hailstorms in North Carolina Obtained from EXRAD Airborne Radar During IPHEx

The Integrated Precipitation and Hydrology Experiment (IPHEx) was conducted in the Southeast U.S. as part of validation for the Global Precipitation Mission precipitation-measuring satellite. IPHEx data sets included a wide variety of precipitation systems including one flight with severe hailstorms in North Carolina. The NASA ER-2 high-altitude aircraft instrumented with 3 nadir-looking radars covering W through X-band (ER-2 X-band radar (EXRAD); Cloud Radar System (CRS); High-altitude Imaging Wind and Rain Airborne Profiler (HIWRAP)) provided key underflight data for the GPM validation. EXRAD had a conically scanning beam in addition to a nadir-pointing beam from which horizontal winds can be derived. In this paper, we provide analysis of these hailstorms with emphasis on the kinematic structure derived from the EXRAD measurements. There were numerous passes over these hailstorms and several approaches are used to look at the data that include simple along-track wind analysis (Heymsfield et al. 1996), as well as a full 3-dimensional optimized wind retrieval. We will describe the 3D wind characteristics of the hailstorms and how they compare with more intense storms in the Great Plains. A previous paper by Battaglia et al. (2015) discussed the hail and scattering aspects of these storms derived from the 4-frequency ER-2 data.