The overarching goal of the Colorado State University Convective CLoud Outflows and UpDrafts Experiment (C3LOUD-Ex) was to enhance our understanding of deep convective storm processes and how they are represented in numerical models. Pivotal to the experiment was a novel “Flying Curtain” strategy.
Welcome to the first Weather and Climate Interactions RP report. The new program name is simply a result of rationalising CLEX’s continuing research program under new headings that more clearly delineate the focus of the work we do.
Storms cause ripples in the wind that travel upwards and away from the clouds, much like a stone causes ripples when it is thrown in a pond. These can then affect the temperature and winds around the storms and make them grow, last longer, or die earlier.
Onboard the RV Investigator as part of a scientific voyage over Christmas and new year, Rob Warren encountered a spectacular storm and performed research that will continue to improve Australia's radar network.
In this study a very high-resolution simulation of a Hector thunderstorm – a large regularly occurring storm near Darwin – is analysed and the hydrating properties of the overshoots are examined.
If you are a stormchaser or just someone who loves the theatre of wind, lightning, heavy rain and hail when a storm whips through, then you are perfectly placed to help climate science with the new WeatheX app.
This research demonstrates how cloud processes, steep mountains, tropical coastlines, the daily changes in solar insolation and planetary-scale waves work together to cause large variations in the tropical heating that drives global circulation patterns. Many of these effects are under-represented in global climate models.
In contrast to expectations, tropical thunderstorms without cold pools actually intensify, demonstrating unequivocally that cold pools can be detrimental to convection. Further investigations suggest that organised systems become maintained through atmospheric wave-convection interactions, which is a significantly different process to the established theory.