COPS Climatology

The Convective and Orographically-induced Precipitation Study (COPS) was an international field campaign designed to improve Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) skill particularly over low mountain regions. This experiment took place in the region of southwestern Germany and eastern France including the Vosges and Black Forest Mountains with the Rhine Valley in between from 1 June to 31 August 2007. The research conducted was a climatology project within this area to locate Convection Initiation's (CI's) and enhancements of convective storms as they propagated into the domain. In this study, their properties were recorded such as location, strength, size and duration during the summer months for the years 2000-2008. The radar network of the German Weather Service DWD was used in the CIDD data display to identify the CI events. After creating plots of the CI locations overlaid onto terrain maps, some interesting features of their properties were noticed. For example, initiations had a slightly larger concentration over the mountains while enhancements had a much larger concentration in the valley. The stronger of these CI events (>45 dBZ) were concentrated more over the mountains whereas the weaker events had no noticeable pattern. Various histograms and scatter plots were also utilized to illustrate these patterns. When analyzing histograms of initiations for each hour, one can see a defined time of day when these events began, which correlates with the daytime heating process as a trigger. The 9-year summer analysis was then compared to the summer of 2007 to illustrate any noticeable differences observed during the COPS field campaign.