Elisa Murillo - October 21

Weather and Climate Systems Seminar

Cold vs. Warm Above-Anvil Cirrus Plumes:

A Preliminary Analysis of 200 Plume Storms using GOES, GridRad, and Environmental Analyses

Elisa Murillo

Wednesday, October 21th

3:00pm

Join Google Meet:

https://meet.google.com/ssf-prpz-fqa

Above-anvil cirrus plumes (AACPs) in midlatitude convection are important indicators of stratospheric hydration events and significantly severe storms. There is large variability in AACP characteristics, for which the causes are not entirely known. Notably, while most AACPs appear warm compared to the broader storm top in infrared satellite imagery, some appear cold. This inhibits the ability to identify nighttime AACPs, given the lack of visible satellite imagery. In this study, we identify a large sample of both warm and cold AACPs to answer the following research question: What are the differences between near-tropopause environments associated with warm AACPs versus cold AACPs? We utilize 1-minute GOES-16 satellite imagery to identify AACPs and the ERA-5 reanalysis to evaluate environmental characteristics. The discussion will focus on the history of AACP research, proposed hypotheses for cold AACP formation, and the methods for data synthesis used in this study.