From GATE Cloud Clusters To MCSs: Bob Houze As The Integrator

Bob Houze’s career personifies the theme of this AMS Annual Meeting, “Observations Lead the Way”.  His first publications as Pauline Austin’s graduate student at MIT were the first of hundreds that showed what could be done by carefully extracting useful information from early weather radar data.  The approach used for size spectra of precipitation systems in New England were soon used to study mesoscale systems in GATE, although back in the day they were referred to by the awful name “cloud clusters”.  His classic case study of a GATE squall line stands today as a template for careful use of the observations. As many of us proceeded to analyze the large variety of mesoscale systems in GATE, Bob Houze may have done more than anyone else, starting with the observations themselves but combined with sound physical reasoning, to formulate reasonable hypotheses that simulations later proved to be correct.  One of those simple physical principles is the conservation of water substance, so once observations established that the mass of water falling through the melting level in stratiform regions was comparable to that condensed in updrafts, he deduced that there must be comparable mesoscale ascent in the ice region, and proposed a full mass and water budget in mesoscale convective systems that stands today.  Together with Alan Betts, their review article on Convection in GATE preceded many other review articles by Bob Houze that have made his body of work the indispensible references on the structure and importance of mesoscale convective systems. This all happened because he recognized that “observations lead the way”.