Steven Sun

My summer project was to search for fine-scale atmospheric gravity waves in the RHI scans from CHATS. Before I began, Liz Jachens identified waves in the PPI scans. I used the GUI developed by Chris Hasek to display the RHI scans nearest in time to the episodes of waves that Liz found.

Initially, I made RHI scans that revealed only the bottom 50 m of the atmosphere between 1.1 and 2.1 km range. Unfortunately, most of the RHI scans resulted in no more than a few beams in this shallow layer making it either difficult or impossible to resolve waves. A few frames show oscillating backscatter intensities as a function of range that might be a result of the waves, but the poor vertical resolution makes it difficult to be sure.

Later, I expanded the altitude range to include the bottom 500 m of the atmosphere over the same horizontal range. This revealed the structure of the lower atmosphere over a much larger depth and included more beams to resolve larger flow features.