Comparison of Moisture and Temperature Profiles during PECAN

The vertical and horizontal distribution of moisture is of great importance in convective initiation within the atmosphere. Recently many remotely sensed ground based instruments have been used to understand how water vapor travels and evolves within the atmosphere. Some of these instruments, such as microwave radiometers (MWR), LIDARs, and microwave temperature profilers (MTP) provide high temporal resolution profiles of temperature and/or humidity, which are important for capturing the drastic changes that can occur in these fields especially in warm season nocturnal systems.

The Plains Elevated Convection At Night (PECAN) field campaign was established to study five main topics specific to nocturnal processes: 1) nocturnal convective initiation, 2) initiation, structure, propagation and evolution of bores and other trapped waves, 3) the structure, evolution and the impact of low-level jet on convective initiation, 4) the dynamical and microphysical structure of mesoscale convective systems (MCS), and 5) improving the prediction of nocturnal convective initiation for warm season storms and MCS in the Great Planes. Using PECAN data, we compare observed temperature, vapor density and relative humidity profiles from of microwave radiometer (MWR), Vaisla RS41 radiosondes, ALVICE LIDAR, MTP, and Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (AERI) deployed during at fixed site 2 (FP2) located in Greenburg, Kansas. Preliminary comparisons show the temperature correlation is better than the relative humidity especially within the lowest portion of the atmosphere.