Identification

Title

The Coastal Convective Interactions Experiment (CCIE): Understanding the role of sea breezes for hailstorm hotspots in Eastern Australia

Abstract

Thunderstorm-affected communities develop an awareness of "hotspot" regions that historically experience more frequent or intense storm activity across many years. A scientifically based understanding of this localized variability has significant implications for both the public and industry; however, a lack of sufficiently long and robust observational datasets has limited prior research at the mesogamma spatial scale (2-20 km). This is particularly true for coastal environments, where hotspot activity has been documented in very few locales (e.g., Florida, southern Appalachian coastal plains, and the Iberian Peninsula), despite 45% of the global population living within 150 km of the coast. The Coastal Convective Interactions Experiment (CCIE) focuses on quantifying hailstorm hotspot activity for the coastal South East Queensland (SEQ) region of Australia and understanding the meteorological conditions that result in the spatial clustering of hailstorm activity. An automated thunderstorm identification and tracking technique applied to 18 years of radar data identifies not only the hailstorm hotpots well known to experienced local forecasters but an apparent link between localized maxima and the presence of sea breeze activity. These climatological findings provided the motivation and guidance for a two-season field campaign to investigate the role of the sea breeze in thunderstorm development. Details of the experiment strategy and equipment specifications are presented alongside preliminary results. Significant complexities were observed within sea-breeze and thunderstorms circulations, limiting the application of standard concepts for idealized gravity current interactions. Furthermore, a multi-instrument case study of a sea-breeze-thunderstorm cold pool interaction identifies the comparatively low sea-breeze buoyancy as the primary contributor toward inhibiting new convective initiation, despite the vorticity balance argument favoring deeper updrafts.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7s75j23

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

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keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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East bounding longitude

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South bounding latitude

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Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-09-01T00:00:00Z

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Use constraints

Copyright 2016 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

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