A Targeted Sounding and LiDAR Retrieved Wind Analysis of the 26 February 2023 Norman, OK Tornado

A quasi-linear convective system (QLCS) on 26 February 2023 produced an EF-2 tornado that tracked 27 miles across central Oklahoma. The strength of the surface to 1 km winds and 0-1 km storm-relative helicity (> 1000 m2 s-2) was unique in this event in the presence of a very strong low-level jet and a strong temperature inversion at the base of an elevated mixed layer observed close to the location/time of the tornado. This environment was sampled by a suite of instruments including a Doppler wind LiDAR, hourly launches of a Vaisala radiosonde, and a near field deployment (10 - 60 km from the QLCS) of swarmsonds. In this case, the swarmsond mission was key in tandem with the other two instruments to capture the inflow environment evolution, namely a rapid lifting of the inversion within minutes of the tornado and a strengthening of the low level shear.

The swarmsond deployment was conducted by launching Windsonds, a relatively new technology developed by Sparv Embedded, that allows for multiple soundings to be connected to a single receiver. In the last ten years these sondes have been used for targeted launches in field campaigns as a way to supplement radiosonde launches, but little work has been done to directly compare the Windsond and radiosonde profiles. Therefore ongoing intercomparison flights with Vaisala radiosondes have been launched in various conditions over the last year to quantitatively measure the differences between the two systems. Minute variances in the 0-3 km thermodynamic profiles and nearly identical smoothed kinematic profiles show that the both systems can represent low-level environments. The sounding profiles coupled with the LiDAR retrieved winds will provide a comprehensive dataset to examine the unusually rapid evolution in the thermodynamic and kinematic environment ahead of the QLCS, which will be presented at the conference.