TRACERSTEREOCAM

One goal of the TRACER campaign is to collect a comprehensive data set that enables convective cloud process studies and key demonstrations for the environmental controls that influence cloud life cycle (i.e., aerosols, thermodynamics). One expectation of TRACER is its ability to capture a large number of individual, isolated convective cells – and to follow the evolution of these cells at high spatiotemporal resolution to characterize changes to cloud kinematic and microphysical properties subject to such controls. Nevertheless, the Houston region experiences a wide range of shallow to deeper precipitating clouds, and any reliance on traditional ARM profiling and scanning cloud radar sampling capabilities is oftentimes insufficient to document initiating, transient, or dissipating cloud behaviors as required to achieve many stated TRACER goals. Recently, ARM has bolstered its cloud profiling instruments with stereo camera technology (ARM STEREOCAM). These instruments have demonstrated unique effectiveness in observing a wide range of critical cloud characteristics – the clouds' horizontal dimensions, elevations, depths, rates for initiation and dissipation, vertical velocities – useful towards establishing how these cloud properties co-vary with the large-scale environment. This deployment. in allowing the inclusion of these ARM instruments, is moving towards a more comprehensive documentation of cloud life cycle, and one that captures a wider span from shallow to deeper convective clouds as anticipated over the Houston/AMF1 deployment zone. A primary scientific motivation for this deployment is to better address the relationships between cloud properties and the ambient conditions, which includes key science drivers such as, “what is the relationship between cloud size or updraft intensity and the environmental wind shear and/or humidity?”

Timeline