Analysis of a Tornadic Mesoscale Convective Vortex Based on Ensemble Kalman Filter Assimilation of CASA X-Band and WSR-88D Radar Data

AbstractOne of the goals of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) is to improve storm-scale numerical weather prediction (NWP) by collecting data with a dense X-band radar network that provides high-resolution low-level coverage, and by assimilating such data into NWP models. During the first spring storm season after the deployment of four radars in the CASA Integrated Project-1 (IP-1) network in southwest Oklahoma, a tornadic mesoscale convective system (MCS) was captured by CASA and surrounding Weather Surveillance Radars-1988 Doppler (WSR-88Ds) on 8–9 May 2007. The MCS moved across northwest Texas and western and central Oklahoma; two tornadoes rated as category 1 on the enhanced Fujita scale (EF-1) and one tornado of EF-0 intensity were reported during the event, just to the north of the IP-1 network. This was the first tornadic convective system observed by CASA.To quantify the impacts of CASA radar data in storm...

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