REAL Observations of Flow over an Urban Area: 7 May 2004



The following animation results from the Raman-shifted Eye-safe Aerosol Lidar (REAL) scanning horizontally just above rooftop and treetop level in Washington DC on 7 May 2004. The range-corrected backscatter intensity has been high-pass median filtered in the radial dimension to eliminate large scale radial trends in the data. It shows an outflow boundary (density current resulting from the outflow of a distant thunderstorm) moving through the lidar's observation area approximately half way through the animation (from 19:20 to 19:25 UTC). An AMS conference publication on the event is described in:

Mayor, S. D., B. M. Morley, S. M. Spuler, S. C. Himmelsbach, D. Flanigan, T. M. Weckwerth, and T. Warner, 2007: Elastic Backscatter lidar observations of a gust front passage over Washington D.C. on 7 May 2004. Paper 9.7 in the Seventh Symposium on the Urban Environment, American Meteorological Society, 10-13 Sept. 2007, San Diego.





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Deployment of REAL in Washington DC.

The Raman-shifted Eye-safe Aerosol Lidar (REAL) scanning horizontally just above rooftop and treetop level in Washington DC on 7 May 2004.

REAL in Washington DC during May 2004

References:

Mayor, S. D., B. M. Morley, S. M. Spuler, S. C. Himmelsbach, D. Flanigan, T. M. Weckwerth, and T. Warner, 2007: Elastic Backscatter lidar observations of a gust front passage over Washington D.C. on 7 May 2004. Paper 9.7 in the Seventh Symposium on the Urban Environment, American Meteorological Society, 10-13 Sept. 2007, San Diego.

Warner, T., P. Benda, S. Swerdlin, J. Knievel, E. Argenta, B. Aronian, B. Balsley, J. Bowers, R. Carter, P. A. Clark, K. Clawson, J. Copeland, A. Crook, R. Frehlich, M. L. Jensen, Y. Liu, S. Mayor, Y. Meillier, B. Morley, R. Sharman, S. Spuler, D. Storwold, J. Sun, J. Weil, M. Xu, A. Yates, and Y. Zhang, 2007: The Pentagon Shield Field Program Toward Critical Infrastructure Protection. Bull. Amer. Met. Soc., 88, 167-176.

Related:

Newsom, R., D. Ligon, D. Garvey: 2009: Dual-Doppler Lidar Observations over Washington DC . Oral presentation & paper 2.2 in the American Meteorological Society's 4th Symp. on Lidar Atmospheric Applications. 10-15 Jan 2009, Phoenix, AZ.

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