Identification

Title

The characteristics of weakly forced mountain-to-plain precipitation systems based on radar observations and high-resolution reanalysis

Abstract

The metropolis of Beijing in China is located on a plain adjacent to high mountains to its northwest and the gulf of the Bohai Sea to its southeast. One of the most challenging forecast problems for Beijing is to predict whether thunderstorms initiating over the mountains will propagate to the adjacent plains and intensify. In this study, 18 warm season convective cases between 2008 and 2013 initiating on the mountains and intensifying on the plains under weak synoptic forcing were analyzed to gain an understanding of their characteristics. The statistical analysis was based on mosaic reflectivity data from six operational Doppler radars and reanalysis data produced by the Four-Dimensional Variational Doppler Radar Analysis System (VDRAS). The analysis of the radar reflectivity data shows that convective precipitation strengthened on the plains at certain preferred locations. To investigate the environmental conditions favoring the strengthening of the mountain-to-plain convective systems, statistical diagnoses of the rapid-update (12min) 3km reanalyses from VDRAS for the 18 cases were performed by computing the horizontal and temporal means of convective available potential energy, convective inhibition, vertical wind shear, and low-level wind for the plain and mountain regions separately. The results were compared with those from a baseline representing the warm season average and from a set of null cases and found considerable differences in these fields between the three data sets. The mean distributions of VDRAS reanalysis fields were also examined. The results suggest that the convergence between the low-level outflows associated with cold pools and the south-southeasterly environmental flows corresponds well with the preferred locations of convective intensification on the plains.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7348n8x

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2017-03-27T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact