VIPRD

The project ‘Demonstration of a New Water Vapor Radar’ will demonstrate and validate observations from a new differential absorption radar, which uses an active sounding approach to remotely measure water vapor within clouds and precipitation. The project will leverage the suite of water vapor sounding observations made at the ARM Southern Great Plains (SGP) site to demonstrate and validate the VIPR observations in a range of convective clouds from shallow fair-weather cumulus to precipitating deep convection. The project will have three main goals: 1. Validate the VIPR in-cloud water vapor observations against radiosonde measurements. 2. Compare water vapor profiles from VIPR with those of the standard suite of profiling instruments at SGP and demonstrate the complementarity of the radar observations with those from passive sounding instruments and lidars. 3. Make the first remote sounding observations of water vapor within deep convective storms using an active radar approach and combine these observations with ancillary temperature data to search for cases of large super saturations exceeding 5%. These large supersaturations in strong convective updrafts are predicted by theory and influence the development of intense storms, yet they are generally neglected in cloud resolving models VIPR is the first radar of its kind using a differential absorption technique to profile water vapor. The demonstration and validation of these data is essential to proving the utility of these observations in combination with the standard remote sensing approaches employed at SGP. This initial effort is an essential element to facility the incorporation of the VIPR radar or its derivatives in future focused efforts to understand the role of water vapor in shaping the convective environment.

Timeline

Campaign Data Sets