Joshua Wurman

• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

While challenging, quantification of the near‐surface landfalling hurricane wind field is necessary for understanding hurricane intensity changes and damage potential. Using single‐ and dual‐Doppler Doppler on Wheels and in situ anemometer data, the wind structure of the very near‐surface boundary layer of Hurricane Laura (2020) is characterized. S...

How do the atmosphere and airborne insects respond to the abrupt cessation and restoration of sunlight during a total eclipse? The Flexible Array of Radars and Mesonets (FARM), including three mobile Doppler on Wheels (DOW) radars, mobile mesonets, Pod weather stations, and an upper-air sounding system, was deployed as an unprecedentedly dense obse...

Quasi-linear convective systems (QLCSs) are responsible for approximately a quarter of all tornado events in the U.S., but no field campaigns have focused specifically on collecting data to understand QLCS tornadogenesis. The Propagation, Evolution, and Rotation in Linear System (PERiLS) project was the first observational study of tornadoes associ...

Modification of grasslands into irrigated and non-irrigated agriculture in the Great Plains results in significant impacts on weather and climate. However, there has been lack of observational data-based studies solely focused on impacts of irrigation on the PBL and convective conditions. The Great Plains Irrigation Experiment (GRAINEX) during the...

During near-0°C surface conditions, diverse precipitation types (p-types) are possible, including rain, drizzle, freezing rain, freezing drizzle, ice pellets, wet snow, snow, and snow pellets. Near-0°C precipitation affects wide swaths of the United States and Canada, impacting aviation, road transportation, power generation and distribution, winte...

Plain Language Summary Wildland‐urban interface (WUI) fires are increasing in the United States and around the world as the built environment continues to expand into the wildland. To better inform real‐time management of active wildfires, it is critical that the scientific community can better predict WUI fire spread. In this study, we rely on mul...

Tornadoes contain some of the strongest winds on earth, causing death and damage when impacting man-made and natural objects, such as buildings and trees. Quantifying tornado winds near the surface is critical to characterizing tornado hazards. Direct measurements of tornado winds are rare and are usually obtained at least >100 m above the ground,...

Waterspout in Macao on 1 June 2021 (provided by radio station of Macao). image

On 30 December 2021, the Marshall Fire devastated the Boulder, Colorado region. The fire initiated in fine fuels in open space just southeast of Boulder and spread rapidly due to the strong, downslope winds that penetrated into the Boulder Foothills. Despite the increasing occurrence of wildland-urban interface (WUI) disasters, many questions remai...

Vortices of diameters 100 m to 10 km have been observed during lake‐effect snowstorms. Lines of misovortices (diameters = 40–4,000 m) have recently been documented forming over Lake Ontario during long lake‐axis‐parallel (LLAP)‐type lake‐effect storms. Using National Weather Service Weather Surveillance Radar—1988 Doppler (WSR‐88D) and Doppler on W...

A tornado/waterspout associated with a supercell thunderstorm was observed in the adjacent waters of southern China on the evening of 18 April 2019. The case was documented using surface weather observations and Doppler radar data. A weather station near the tornado/waterspout, recorded wind gusts corresponding to hurricane intensity for a few seco...

The wind field of a waterspout that occurred near the Hong Kong International Airport was documented using dual-Doppler analysis from a dense network of Doppler Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) systems operated at the airport, and nearby surface weather station observations. The dual-Doppler winds are used in tandem with surface observations to...

Department of Transportation (DOT)

Extensive expansion in irrigated agriculture has taken place over the last half century. Due to increased irrigation and resultant land use land cover change, the central United States has seen a decrease in temperature and changes in precipitation during the second half of 20 th century. To investigate the impacts of widespread commencement of irr...

The Flexible Array of Radars and Mesonets (FARM) Facility is an extensive mobile/quickly-deployable (MQD) multiple-Doppler radar and in-situ instrumentation network. The FARM includes four radars: two 3-cm dual-polarization, dual-frequency (DPDF), Doppler On Wheels DOW6/DOW7, the Rapid-Scan DOW (RSDOW), and a quickly-deployable (QD) DPDF 5-cm COW C...

This article provides an overview of the experimental design, execution, education and public outreach, data collection, and initial scientific results from the Remote sensing of Electrification, Lightning, And Mesoscale/microscale Processes with Adaptive Ground Observations (RELAMPAGO) field campaign. RELAMPAGO was a major field campaign conducted...

Significance This study documents the actual distribution of supercell-tornado wind intensities and sizes, revealing that most are much stronger than damage surveys indicate, with >20% of tornadoes potentially capable of causing catastrophic EF-4/EF-5 damage. Additionally, supercell tornadoes are shown to be much wider than damage surveys indicate....

During the RELAMPAGO-CACTI field experiments in 2018-19, an unprecedented number of balloon-borne soundings were collected in Argentina. Radiosondes were launched from both fixed and mobile platforms, yielding 2712 soundings during the period 15 October 2018-30 April 2019. Approximately 20% of these soundings were collected by highly mobile platfor...

On 10 November 2018, during the RELAMPAGO field campaign in Argentina, South America, a thunderstorm with supercell characteristics was observed by an array of mobile observing instruments, including three Doppler on Wheels radars. In contrast to the archetypal supercell described in the Glossary of Meteorology, the updraft rotation in this storm w...

Continued scientific study has revealed that land use and land cover change play a key role in climate and that the application of irrigation is an important biogeophysical contributor to climate modification across spatial scales. The Great Plains Irrigation Experiment (GRAINEX) was conducted in the spring and summer of 2018 to investigate Land-At...

During the Ontario Winter Lake-effect Systems (OWLeS) field campaign, 12 long-lake-axis-parallel (LLAP) snowband events were sampled. Misovortices occurred in 11 of these events, with characteristic diameters of ~800 m, differential velocities of ~11 m s ⁻¹ , and spacing between vortices of ~3 km. A detailed observational analysis of one such snowb...

While Hurricane Harvey will best be remembered for record rainfall that led to widespread flooding in southeastern Texas and western Louisiana, the storm also produced some of the most extreme wind speeds ever to be captured by an adaptive mesonet at landfall. This paper describes the unique tools and the strategy used by the Digital Hurricane Cons...

Two of the "Doppler on Wheels" facility radars (DOW6 and DOW7) have been upgraded to dual-polarization capabilities and operate at two closely spaced X-band frequencies. For particles with sizes that are large relative to the wavelength, resonance scattering effects may lead to differences in the backscattered radiation between these two frequencie...

Strong hurricanes cause severe, but highly variable, wind damage to homes and community infrastructure. It has been speculated, but not previously shown, that damage variability is caused by tornadoes or other small-scale phenomena. Here, the authors present the first mapping and tracking of persistent tornado-scale vortices (TSVs) in the eyewall a...

During the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2) field campaign, mobile radars observed a previously undocumented feature: the low-reflectivity ribbon (LRR). The LRR was characterized by reduced reflectivity ZH and differential reflectivity ZDR through a narrow region extending from the intersection of the...

The detection of complex spatially and temporally varying coherent structures in data from highly nonlinear and non-Gaussian systems is a challenging problem in a wide range of scientific disciplines. This is the case in the analysis of Doppler on Wheels (DOW) mobile Doppler radar (MDR) data where the goal is to detect rapidly evolving coherent sto...

Doppler radar data corresponding to five tornado events are analyzed using the Ground-Based Velocity Track Display method and the three-dimensional velocity field of nine volumetric samples is extracted. These samples are selected to cover a range of wind speeds (between 36 m/s and 64 m/s) and vortex structures representative of EF0 to EF3 tornadoe...

Vortex shedding occurs downstream of Lantau Island over the Hong Kong International Airport and can be hazardous to aircraft operating from that airport. An in-depth analysis of a vortex shedding structure is conducted using surface observations and Ground-Based Velocity Track Display (GBVTD) analysis of the Doppler Light Detection and Ranging (LID...

Recent lake-effect snow field projects in the eastern Great Lakes region have 28 revealed the presence of misovortices with diameters between 40 and 4000 m along cyclonic horizontal shear zones within long lake-axis-parallel bands. One particular band in which an abundance of misovortices developed occurred on 7 January 2014. The leading hypothesis...

Intense lake-effect snowstorms regularly develop over the eastern Great Lakes, resulting in extreme winter weather conditions with snowfalls sometimes exceeding one meter. The Ontario Winter Lake-effect Systems (OWLeS) field campaign sought to obtain unprecedented observations of these highly complex winter storms. OWLeS employed an extensive and d...

The central Great Plains region in North America has a nocturnal maximum in warm-season precipitation. Much of this precipitation comes from organized mesoscale convective systems (MCSs). This nocturnal maximum is counterintuitive in the sense that convective activity over the Great Plains is out of phase with the local generation of CAPE by solar...

Storm-scale and mesocyclone-scale processes occurring contemporaneously with a tornado in the Goshen County, Wyoming, supercell observed on 5 June 2009 during the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2) are examined using ensemble analyses produced by assimilating mobile radar and in situ observations into a...

On 10 June 2010, the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2) armada collected a rare set of observations of a nontornadic and a tornadic supercell evolving in close proximity to each other. The storms and their environments were analyzed using single- and dual-Doppler radar, mobile mesonet, deployable surfac...

A detailed damage survey of the El Reno, Oklahoma, tornado of 31 May 2013 combined with rapid-scanning data recorded from two mobile radars is presented. One of the radars was equipped with polarimetric capability. The relationship between several suction vortices visually identified in pictures with the high-resolution Doppler velocity data and sw...

A National Science Foundation sponsored Educational Deployment of a Doppler on Wheels radar called the “Hawaiian Educational Radar Opportunity” (HERO) was conducted on O`ahu from 21 October to 13 November 2013. This was the first ever deployment of a dual-polarimetric X-band (3-cm) research radar in Hawai`i. A unique fine-resolution radar and radio...

Experimentally simulated tornado-like vortices are related to field tornadoes in order to: (i) establish proper kinematic and dynamic scaling and (ii) attempt to determine a relationship between laboratory parameters and the Enhanced Fujita Scale (EF-Scale). Data from recent in-situ Doppler radar campaigns are analyzed using the Ground-Based Veloci...

New diagnostic methods are presented for localized, barotropic vorticity evolution in tornadic environments. These methods focus on superhelicity, a quantity shown to be strongly related to local maxima in vorticity tendency. Mobile Doppler radar retrievals from three well-known cases of tornadogenesis were studied with this new approach. The resul...

Two Doppler on Wheels (DOW) mobile radars collected fine-spatial-scale dual-Doppler data in the right-front quadrant and eye of Hurricane Frances (2004) as it made landfall near Stuart, Florida. A 5.7-km dual-Doppler baseline established a dual-Doppler domain south and east of Fort Pierce, Florida, encompassing a 5.5 km x 5.5 km horizontal area, wi...

A National Science Foundation Educational Deployment of a Doppler on Wheels radar called the Hawaiian Educational Radar Opportunity (HERO) was conducted on O'ahu from 21 October to 13 November 2013. A total of 16 intensive observing periods collected many hours of tropical weather radar observations through a collaborative effort between undergradu...

A nonmesocyclone tornado traversed the Hong Kong International Airport on September 6, 2004 directly impacting a surface weather station. This allowed for 1-second 10-meter above ground level (AGL) wind observations through the core of the tornado. Integration of these 10-meter AGL wind data with Ground-Based Velocity Track (GBVTD) wind retrievals...

High-resolution Doppler radar velocities and in situ surface observations collected in a tornadic supercell on 5 June 2009 during the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2) are assimilated into a simulated convective storm using an ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). A series of EnKF experiments using a 1-km hor...

A large and violent tornado/multiple-vortex mesocyclone (MVMC) tracked east and northeastward near El Reno, Oklahoma, on 31 May 2013, causing eight fatalities, including storm chasers/researchers attempting to deploy in situ instrumentation. Subvortices moved within and near the MVMC, some in trochoidal-like patterns, with ground-relative translati...

Data collected from a Doppler on Wheels (DOW) mobile radar deployed in Port Arthur, Texas, near the point of landfall of Hurricane Rita (2005) and from two Florida Coastal Monitoring Program 10-m weather stations (FCMP-WSs) are used to characterize wind field variability, including hurricane boundary layer (HBL) streaks/rolls, during the hurricane'...

The finescale three-dimensional structure and evolution of the near-surface boundary layer of a tornado (TBL) is mapped for the first time. The multibeam Rapid-Scan Doppler on Wheels (RSDOW) collected data at several vertical levels, as low as 4, 6, 10, 12, 14, and 17m above ground level (AGL), contemporaneously at 7-s intervals for several minutes...

A variety of vortex configurations observed at finescale with Doppler On Wheels (DOW) radars in and near the hook echoes of supercell thunderstorms are described. These include marginal/weak tornadoes, often with no documented condensation funnels, debris rings, or low-reflectivity eyes; multiple-vortex mesocyclones; multiple simultaneous tornadoes...

The DOW facility is a network of mobile radars, currently consisting of two dual-frequency, dual-polarization fast-scanning radars, and a multi-frequency multi-beam rapid-scan radar. DOWs have been deployed recently to the ASCII weather modification study, the LLAP lake effect snow study, the VORTEX2 tornado study, the ROTATE low level tornadic win...

During the spring of 2013, attempts were made to deploy a dual-polarization, dual-frequency Doppler on Wheels (DOW) mobile radar (DOW6 hereafter) and the Rapid-Scan-DOW (RSDOW hereafter) along with in-situ tornado pod instrumentation near and in several violent (EF-3 or greater) tornadoes. These include the EF-3 El Reno, OK tornado (31 May) the EF-...

The eastern Great Lakes (Erie and Ontario) are often affected by intense lake-effect snowfalls. Lake-effect storms that form parallel to the major axes of these lakes can strongly impact communities by depositing more than 100 cm of snowfall in less than 24 h. Long-lake-axis-parallel (LLAP) storms are significantly different in structure and dynami...

Experimentally and numerically simulated tornado-like vortices are related to field tornadoes in order to increase the feasibility of studying the effects of tornadic flows on structures. Data from Doppler radars is analyzed using a Ground-Based Velocity Track Display (GBVTD) method and a unique database of three-dimensional axisymmetric tornado fl...

The genesis of a strong and long-lived tornado observed during the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2) in Goshen County, Wyoming, on 5 June 2009 is studied. Mobile radar, mobile mesonet, rawinsonde, and photographic data are used to produce an integrated analysis of the evolution of the wind, precipitati...

In the United States, visual observations of tornadoes and/or the existence of tornado damage currently provide the sole evidence of tomadogenesis in association with a mesocyclone or other radar-detected storm-scale vortex. The severity of the tornado damage is currently the only means of estimating the intensity of tornadoes, radar detected or ot...

Direct observations of the winds inside a tornado were obtained with an instrumented armored vehicle, the Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV), and integrated with finescale mobile Doppler radar (Doppler on Wheels) data revealing, for the first time, the structure of the near-ground three-dimensional wind field in and around the core region of a strong...

A ground-based velocity track display (GBVTD) analysis of the LaGrange, Wyoming, tornado on 5 June 2009 during the Second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2) is photogrammetrically combined with a series of pictures of the funnel cloud. This analysis reveals the relationship between the vertical velocity, radia...

The authors analyze the pretornadic phase (2100–2148 UTC; tornadogenesis began at 2152 UTC) of the Goshen County, Wyoming, supercell of 5 June 2009 intercepted by the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2). The analysis relies on radar data from the Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) in Cheye...

The dynamical processes responsible for the intensification of low-level rotation prior to tornadogenesis are investigated in the Goshen County, Wyoming, supercell of 5 June 2009 intercepted by the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2). The circulation of material circuits that converge upon the low-level...

The second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2), which had its field phases in May and June of 2009 and 2010, was designed to explore i) the physical processes of tornadogenesis, maintenance, and demise; ii) the relationships among tornadoes, tornadic storms, and the larger-scale environment; iii) numerical weat...

The hurricane boundary layer is comprised of coherent structures that are potentially responsible for significant transport of turbulent fluxes throughout the hurricane boundary layer as well as regions of enhanced damage at the surface. These coherent structures are not well understood and consequently their effects are poorly represented in numer...

A weak tornado with a maximum Doppler velocity shear of about 40ms−1 moved across the Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) during the evening of 20 May 2002. The tornado caused damage equivalent to F0 on the Fujita Scale, based on a damage survey. The Doppler velocity data from the Hong Kong Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) are studied using...

Dual-Doppler wind synthesis and ensemble Kalman filter analyses produced by assimilating Doppler-on-Wheels velocity data collected in four tornadic supercells are examined in order to further understand the maintenance of tornadoes. Although tornado-scale features are not resolved in these analyses, larger-scale processes involved with tornado main...

2011: Characteristics of the wind field in a trio of nontornadic low-level mesocyclones observed by the Doppler on Wheels radars. Electronic J. Severe Storms Meteor., 6 (3), 1–48. ABSTRACT The three-dimensional wind fields within three nontornadic supercell thunderstorms are retrieved from dual-Doppler radar observations obtained by a pair of Doppl...

The vortex detection and characterization (VDAC) technique is designed to identify tornadoes, mesocyclones, and other convective vortices in multiple-Doppler radar data and retrieve their size, strength, and translational velocity. The technique consists of fitting radial wind data from two or more radars to a simple analytical model of a vortex an...

This study presents the synthesis of dual-Doppler and cloud photography data of the 5 June 2009 Goshen County, Wyoming, tornado observed during the Second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment (VORTEX2). Analyses focused on the hook region of the parent supercell. It will be shown that radar-determined tornadogenesis and i...

Finescale single- and dual-Doppler observations are used to diagnose the three-dimensional structure of the wind field surrounding a tornado that occurred near the town of Orleans, Nebraska, on 22 May 2004. The evolution of the vorticity and divergence fields and other structures near the tornado are documented in the lowest kilometer. Changes in t...

The three-dimensional axisymmetric wind field structure of the violent Spencer, South Dakota, 1998 tornado was analyzed using the ground-based velocity track display (GBVTD) method. Data from a Doppler on Wheels mobile radar, collected at very close range to the tornado, were used to conduct the GBVTD calculations at a very fine (16 m) resolution....

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Meteorology and Physical Oceanography, 1982. Supervised by Raymond Pierrehumbert. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 194-196).

A major impediment to the advancement of Tropical Cyclone (TC) intensity forecasting and infrastructure damage mitigation is the void of data describing the near ground behavior of wind and water at the marine-coastal interface. The Digital Hurricane Consortium (DHC) is the newly formed umbrella organization that coordinates existing field deployme...

I am standing on a bridge near the North Carolina coast. There is a light breeze, and I am enjoying some hazy sunshine. But this calm is an illusion: in a few minutes winds of up to 45ms⁻¹ (100 mph) will sweep in again. The approaches to my section of the bridge are already drowned under 2.5 m of water, and my companions on this island are an eclec...

Polarimetric and dual-Doppler observations of a supercell observed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) S-band Polarimetric (SPOL) radar, two Doppler-On-Wheels (DOW) radars, and the Greek XPOL radar on 23 May 2002 during the International H2O Project (IHOP) are presented. The polarimetric radar observations began as the storm orga...

This paper is motivated by the recent interest in the "descending reflectivity cores" (DRCs) that have been observed in some supercell thunderstorms prior to the development or intensification of low-level rotation. The DRCs of interest descend on the right rear flank of the storms and are small in scale, relative to the main radar echo. They are o...

Fine-resolution single- and dual-Doppler data were collected in the tornadic region of a supercell storm intercepted by two Doppler-on-Wheels radars on 30 April 2000 near Crowell, Texas. Eleven dual-Doppler analyses characterize the 2D and 3D near-surface wind fields associated with a tornado during a 13-min period. An interesting evolution of the...

This note assesses the improvements in dual-Doppler wind syntheses by employing a multipass Barnes objective analysis in the interpolation of radial velocities to a Cartesian grid, as opposed to a more typical single-pass Barnes objective analysis. Steeper response functions can be obtained by multipass objective analyses; that is, multipass object...

Instructors at The Pennsylvania State University report on their experience of developing a course in radar meteorology in conjunction with a field experiment utilizing the Doppler On Wheels (DOW) radars maintained by the Center for Severe Weather Research. The field experiment) coined the Pennsylvania Area Mobile Radar Experiment (PAMREX), was ine...

The purpose of this letter is to present an analysis of the three-dimensional wind field retrieved from mobile Doppler radar data of the 12 May 2004 Harper, KS tornadoes. The derived three-dimensional vortex structure and its surrounding flow show marked temporal and spatial variability. This has significant implications on the numerical modeling o...

Three-dimensional dual-Doppler observations with unprecedented finescale spatial and temporal reso-lution are used to characterize the vector wind field and vorticity generation terms in and near a weak, short-lived tornado. The beam widths of the two Doppler on Wheels (DOW) mobile radars, at the range of the tornado, are 250 m with gate lengths of...

During the International H 2 O Project, mobile radars collected high-resolution data of several 0.5–2-km-wide vertically oriented vortices (or misocyclones) along at least five mesoscale airmass boundaries. This study analyzes the properties of the misocyclones in three of these datasets—3, 10, and 19 June 2002—to verify findings from finescale num...

Dual-Doppler observations with unprecedented finescale spatial and temporal resolution are used to characterize the vector wind field in and near a tornado occurring near Kiefer, Oklahoma, on 26 May 1997. Analyses of the dual-Doppler vector wind fields document in detail, for the first time, several structures associated with the tornado: a proxima...

Using an axisymmetric model of tornado structure tightly constrained by high-resolution wind field measurements collected by Doppler on Wheels (DOW) mobile radars, the potential impacts of intense tornadoes crossing densely populated urban areas are evaluated. DOW radar measurements combined with in situ low-level wind measurements permit the quant...

This chapter describes a commercial bistatic receiver, for convenience called a bistatic network receiver (BNR). Two or more BNRs hitchhiking off a monostatic doppler weather radar can retrieve full, three-dimensional vector wind fields.

On 29 May 2001, Doppler on Wheels radars collected data on a supercell near Kress, Texas. The supercellular storm, cyclic in nature, produced multiple mesocyclones throughout its lifetime. Dual-Doppler syntheses were conducted using a grid spacing of 100 m, resulting in the highest-resolution observational analysis of a cyclic supercell to date. In...

The finescale structure and evolution of a cold front in the presence of small-scale circulations are examined using overdetermined dual-Doppler syntheses of mobile radar data along with thermodynamic data and cloud imagery collected on 10 June 2002 during the International H2O Project (IHOP). Linear clear-air reflectivity maxima and open cellular...

Using a single-Doppler dataset, the ground-based velocity-track-display (GBVTD)technique was employed to retrieve, for the first time, the detailed 3D dynamical structure of a tornado. With GBVTD, the axisymmetric ring-like vorticity field of the tornado, with peak values of more than 0.3 s-1, was explicitly resolved and found to exhibit the necess...

On 3 May 1999, an unusually large tornado that caused F4-level damage and killed several people was intercepted by the Doppler on Wheels (DOW) mobile radar near Mulhall, Oklahoma, from a range of 4 to 9 km, resulting in high-resolution volumetric data every 55 s up to 1.5-km altitude over a period of 14 min. For the first time, the evolution and th...

High-resolution Doppler radar observations of tornadoes reveal a distinctive tornado-scale signature with the following properties: a reflectivity minimum aloft inside the tornado core (described previously as an “eye”), a high-reflectivity tube aloft that is slightly wider than the tornado core, and a tapering of this high-reflectivity tube near t...

IntroductionBasic Radar OperationRadar Observations of Selected PhenomenaGoal: True Wind VectorsData Assimilation into Computer ModelsNew and Nonconventional Technologies

A violent supercell tornado passed through the town of Spencer, South Dakota, on the evening of 30 May 1998 producing large gradients in damage severity. The tornado was rated at F4 intensity by damage survey teams. A Doppler On Wheels (DOW) mobile radar followed this tornado and observed the tornado at ranges between 1.7 and 8.0 km during various...

On the evening of 30 May 1998 atmospheric conditions across southeastern South Dakota led to the development of organized moist convection including several supercells. One such supercell was tracked by both a Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) from Sioux Falls, South Dakota (KFSD), and by a Doppler On Wheels (DOW) mobile radar. This...

An approximate (rapid scan) dynamical model for single-Doppler retrieval of the vector wind field is inves- tigated. This approximate model is based on the Lagrangian form of the radial component of the equation of motion and is valid for retrieval time windows that are smaller than the effective timescale of the flow but larger than the product of...

The accuracy of wind vectors derived from bistatic dual-Doppler synthesis was investigated. The investigation was based on mathematical examinations and observation data analyses in both convective and stratiform cases. Accurate wind vectors were calculated within a range of 40° < β < 150°, where β was the bistatic scatter angle. The accuracy is ma...

The Schools of the Pacific Rainfall Climate Experiment (SPaRCE) is a cooperative educational and research project that involves elementary, middle, and high schools, trade schools, colleges, and meteorological services from various Pacific islands, atolls, and the U.S. The educational materials that the program provides to Pacific area schools invo...

The 3 May 1999 Oklahoma City storm is unique from a weather radar perspective because a long-track violent tornado passed within close range of several Doppler radars, because a detailed damage survey was conducted immediately after the event, and because high-quality visual observations of the tornado were available. The tornado passed relatively...

The structure and behavior of multiple subtornadic-scale vortices in a tornado were examined and were compared with laboratory, conceptual, and numerical models. Unique radar observations of an exceptionally large and violent tornado obtained with a Doppler on Wheels mobile radar on 3 May 1999 in northern Oklahoma provided the opportunity, for the...

Apache 107 s 300 m 0.3-2.6 0.7-1.0 Choctaw 13 s 50 m 0.5-1.0 0.1-0.4 Thedford 55 s 170 m 0.05-4.2 0.0-0.5 Throck. 105 s 150 m 0.2-0.9 0.2-0.5 Brady 45 s 300 m 0.3-5.9 1.0-7.0 Table 1. DOW data characteristics during tornadogenesis.