Characterize Environmental Conditions around Convective Storm with Airborne Raman lidar

To advance our understanding of severe local storms, measurements of environmental conditions around the severe local storms are important, but they are difficult to collect. During the PECAN (Plains Elevated Convection At Night) field campaign 2015, we demonstrated that airborne Raman lidar provide unique measurements to better understand convective cloud initiation, storm evolution, and storm-environment interactions.  During PECAN, a compact Raman lidar (CRL) system was deployed on University Wyoming King Air (UWKA) to provide simultaneous measurements of aerosol, water vapor, temperature and clouds. Together with in situ measurements, CRL provide measurements to characterize rapid changing storm environments. Observational examples for convective initiation, cold pool, and bore will be provided to illustrate the potentials. Furthermore, the capability of newly developed Multi-function Airborne Raman Lidar (MARLi) will be illustrated.