Lauren Pounds - November 19

Convective Meteorology (Mesoscale Dynamics)   Analysis of Hail Trajectories from the 29 May 2012 Kingfisher, OK Supercell   Lauren Pounds   Friday, November 19 3:00 PM Join Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/iru-ggiv-afj   During the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry Experiment (DC3), a wealth of data was collected on a hail-producing tornadic

Start

November 19, 2021 - 3:00 pm

End

November 19, 2021 - 4:00 pm

Convective Meteorology (Mesoscale Dynamics)

 

Analysis of Hail Trajectories from the 29 May 2012 Kingfisher, OK Supercell

 

Lauren Pounds

 

Friday, November 19

3:00 PM

Join Google Meet:

https://meet.google.com/iru-ggiv-afj

 

During the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry Experiment (DC3), a wealth of data was collected on a hail-producing tornadic supercell near Kingfisher, OK on 29-30 May 2012. Three mobile radars collected radial velocity, reflectivity, and polarimetric data over a ~70-minute period during the storm’s mature phase. Additionally, far-environmental and in-storm soundings were taken following the storm’s track, while hail samples were collected in the town of Kingfisher, OK by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS). The 4-D storm fields of airflow and reflectivity from multi-Doppler radar analyses are combined with 4-D Diabatic Lagrangian Analysis (DLA) retrievals of temperature and water substance and WRF-HAILCAST (Adams-Selin and Ziegler 2016) hail physics to compute densely spaced Lagrangian hail growth trajectories for the present study. Hail embryos are inserted in the hail growth module every three minutes of the radar analysis period (2251-0000 UTC) to produce over 3.3 million hail trajectories. Results of these trajectories are presented in two parts: 1) following the trajectories of various size categories throughout the storm and 2) validation of the hail growth module.  Using a new, unique dataset we validate previous hail growth trajectory theories and introduce new hypotheses. Simulated hail swaths provide spatial understanding of hail diameters and concentrations at the ground. Among several key findings, the surface occurrence of numerically simulated severe hail is favored over non-severe hail by significantly longer residence times in 30-50 m/s updrafts and supercooled cloud water contents exceeding 5 g/kg. Another key finding is that severe surface hail embryos originate in a stagnation region close to the main updraft, as well as from the edge of the cross-shear anvil southwest of the updraft. Additionally, the largest severe hail falls to ground preferentially along the southern (storm-inflow) flank of the hail swath. The comparison of collected hail samples from IBHS provides insight into improvements that could be made to the hail growth module to produce more realistic hailstones.