PECAN Refractivity Retrievals from the S-Pol Radar

The Plains Elevated Convection At Night (PECAN) field campaign ran from 1 June through 15 July 2015. As part of the field campaign, the NCAR S-Pol radar was deployed south of Hays, Kansas filling an important gap in the operational NEXRAD radar coverage and providing high resolution, dual-polarization data on nocturnal convective storm initiation and evolution. Near surface water vapor information can also be obtained from the S-Pol radar by applying a radar refractivity retrieval technique developed by Fabry et al (1997). This retrieval technique was first run on S-Pol during the International H₂0 Project (IHOP_2002; Weckwerth et al 2004) and later run on S-Pol during the REFRACTT 2006 (Roberts et al 2008) and TIMREX 2008 (Jou et al 2010) field experiments. Recently the refractivity retrieval algorithm has been run on the complete S-Pol dataset collected during PECAN and will be available for use by PECAN scientists.

This presentation will discuss some of the challenges associated with the processing of the PECAN dataset and provide guidelines for interpretation of refractivity fields. Examples of surface moisture evolution for a few PECAN cases of particular interest will also be shown.