Mon., April 21, 2014

Time enough for "One and Only" and "Set Fire to the Rain" from Adele before class today.  Man can she ever sing.  Might just have to play songs of hers for the rest of the semester.

The Rainbows, Mirages, and Green Flash reports have been graded and were returned today.  They'll be included in the grade summaries that I'm planning on handing out on Wednesday.  I still have the Regional Winds and Foucault Pendulum reports.  They haven't been graded yet. 

The Atmospheric Stability worksheets were collected today.

I can see the light at the end of the semester and have a pretty good idea what we will be covering between now and then.  Here are the topics that will lead up to Quiz #4.

Today:  Thunderstorms pt. 1
Wednesday (Apr. 23): Thunderstorms pt. 2 & Tornadoes pt. 1
Friday: Tornadoes pt. 2 & Lightning pt. 1 (perhaps)
Monday: Lightning
Wednesday (Apr. 30): Quiz #4

Today and part of next Wednesday will be devoted to thunderstorms.  Here's a little bit of an introduction (found on p. 150 in the ClassNotes)


Thunderstorms come in different sizes and levels of severity.  We will mostly be concerned with ordinary single-cell thunderstorms (also referred to as air mass thunderstorms).  They form in the middle of warm moist air, away from fronts.  Most summer thunderstorms in Tucson are this type.   An air mass thunderstorm has a vertical updraft.  A cell is just a term that means a single thunderstorm "unit" (a storm with an updraft and a downdraft).

Tilted updrafts are found in severe and supercell thunderstorms.  As we shall see this allows those storms to get bigger, stronger, and last longer.  The tilted updraft will sometimes begin to rotate.  We'll see this produces an interesting cloud feature called a wall cloud and maybe tornadoes.  Supercell thunderstorms have a complex internal structure;  we'll watch a short video at some point that shows a computer simulation of the complex air motions inside a supercell thunderstorm.

We won't spend anytime discussing mesoscale convective systems except to say that they are a much larger storm system.  They can cover a large portion of a state.  They move slowly and often thunderstorm activity can persist for much of a day.  Occasionally in the summer in Tucson we'll have activity that lasts throughout the night.  This is often caused by an MCS.

The following somewhat tedious material was intended to prepare you to better appreciate a time lapse video movie of a thunderstorm developing over the Catalina mountains.  I don't expect you to remember all of the details given below.  The figures below are more carefully drawn versions of what was done in class.


Refer back and forth between the lettered points in the figure above and the commentary below.

The numbers in Column A show the temperature of the air in the atmosphere at various altitudes above the ground (note the altitude scale on the right edge of the figure).  On this particular day the air temperature was decreasing at a rate of 8 C per kilometer.  This rate of decrease is referred to as the environmental lapse rate (lapse rate just means rate of decrease with altitude).  Temperature could decrease more quickly than shown here or less rapidly.  Temperature in the atmosphere can even increase with increasing altitude (a temperature inversion).

At Point B, some of the surface air is put into an imaginary container, a parcel.  Then a meteorological process of some kind lifts the air to 1 km altitude (in Arizona in the summer, sunlight heats the ground and air in contact with the ground, the warm air becomes buoyant - that's called free convection).  The rising air will expand and cool as it is rising.  Unsaturated air (RH is less than 100%) cools at a rate of 10 C per kilometer.  So the 15 C surface air will have a temperature of 5 C once it arrives at 1 km altitude. 

Early in the morning "Mother Nature" is only able to lift the parcel to 1 km and "then lets go."  At Point C note that the air inside the parcel is slightly colder than the air outside (5 C inside versus 7 C outside).  The air inside the parcel will be denser than the air outside and the parcel will sink back to the ground.  You can't see this because the air is clear, transparent.

By 10:30 am the parcel is being lifted to 2 km as shown at Point D.  It is still cooling 10 C for every kilometer of altitude gain.  At 2 km, at Point E  the air has cooled to its dew point temperature, the relative humidity is now 100%,  and a cloud has formed.  Notice at Point F, the air in the parcel or in the cloud (-5 C) is still colder and denser than the surrounding air (-1 C), so the air will sink back to the ground and the cloud will disappear.  Still no thunderstorm at this point.


At noon, the air is lifted to 3 km.  Because the air became saturated at 2 km, it will cool at a different rate between 2 and 3 kms altitude.  It cools at a rate of 6 C/km instead of 10 C/km.  The saturated air cools more slowly because release of latent heat during condensation offsets some of the cooling due to expansion.  The air that arrives at 3km, Point H, is again still colder than the surrounding air and will sink back down to the surface.

By 1:30 pm the air is getting high enough that it has become neutrally buoyant, it has the same temperature and density as the air around it (-17 C inside and -17 C outside).  This is called the level of free convection, Point J in the figure.

If you can, somehow or another,  lift air above the level of free convection it will find itself warmer and less dense than the surrounding air as shown at Point K and will float upward to the top of the troposphere on its own.  This is really the beginning of a thunderstorm.  The thunderstorm will grow upward until it reaches very stable air at the bottom of the stratosphere.

This was followed by a time lapse video showing a day's worth of work leading eventually to the development of a thunderstorm.  The computer in our classroom wouldn't display the video (it did work in the ILC building later in the day).  Click on the link and see if your computer will play the movie.

The events leading up to the initiation of a summer air mass thunderstorm are summarized in the figure below.  It can take a good deal of effort and often a good part of the day before a thunderstorm forms.  The air must be lifted to just above the level of free convection (the dotted line at middle left in the picture).  Once air is lifted above the level of free convection it finds itself warmer and less dense that the air around it and floats upward on its own.  I've tried to show this with colors below.  Cool colors below the level of free convection because the air in the lifted parcel is colder and denser than its surroundings.  Warm colors above the dotted line indicate parcel air that is warmer and less dense than the surroundings.  Once the parcel is lifted above the level of free convection it becomes buoyant; this is the moment at which the air mass thunderstorm begins. 





Once a thunderstorm develops it then goes through a 3-stage life cycle


In the first stage you would only find updrafts inside the cloud (that's all you need to know about this stage, you don't even need to remember the name of the stage).

Once precipitation has formed and grown to a certain size, it will begin to fall and drag air downward with it.  This is the beginning of the mature stage where you find both an updraft and a downdraft inside the cloud.  The falling precipitation will also pull in dry air from outside the thunderstorm (this is called entrainment).  Precipitation will mix with this drier air and evaporate.  The evaporation will strengthen the downdraft (the evaporation cools the air and makes it more dense).  The thunderstorm is strongest in the mature stage.  This is when the heaviest rain, hail, strongest winds, and most of the lightning occur.

Eventually the downdraft spreads horizontally throughout the inside of the cloud and begins to interfere with the updraft.  This marks the beginning of the end for this thunderstorm. 


The downdraft eventually fills the interior of the cloud.  In this dissipating stage you would only find weak downdrafts throughout the cloud.

Note how the winds from one thunderstorm can cause a region of convergence on one side of the original storm and can lead to the development of new storms.  Preexisting winds refers to winds that were blowing before the thunderstorm formed.  Convergence between the preexisting and the thunderstorm downdraft winds creates rising air that can initiate a new thunderstorm.

Here's a sketch of 4 thunderstorm clouds and a question: what information could you add to each picture.



You'll find the answer to the question at the end of today's notes.

The picture below shows some of the features at the base of a thunderstorm.



 The cold downdraft air spilling out of a thunderstorm hits the ground and begins to move outward from underneath the thunderstorm.  The leading edge of this outward moving air is called a gust front.  You can think of it as a dust front because the gust front winds often stir up a lot of dust here in the desert southwest (see below).



The gust front in this picture (taken near Winslow, Az) is moving from the right to the left.  Visibility in the dust cloud can drop to near zero which makes this a serious hazard to automobile traffic.  Dust storms like this are sometimes called "haboobs".

There's lots of video on YouTube of an impressive dust storm a few summers ago.  Here's an example from Gilbert Arizona.  Another from South Mountain (same storm seen from a different location).  You can see day literally turn to night when the dust cloud is overhead.

Here's a video from a summer 2012 dust storm captured from the front window of a vehicle that drove through the storm.  This video wasn't shown in class.  Check the last minute or two of the video where visibility drops to near zero.  Officials recommend that you drive off the highway under conditions like this, turn off your lights, and take your foot off the brake so that your brake lights are not on.  Otherwise someone might follow your lights thinking you're still on the highway and run into you from behind.  And finally an interesting report on the 1935 Black Sunday dust storm in the Central Plains.  I'm not sure but it doesn't sound like this was caused by thunderstorm winds, rather winds from a larger storm system.



A narrow intense downdraft is called a microburst.  At the ground microburst winds will sometimes reach 100 MPH (over a limited area); most tornadoes have winds of 100 MPH or less.  Microburst winds can damage homes (especially mobile homes that aren't tied to the ground), uproot trees, and seem to blow over a line of electric power poles at some point every summer in Tucson (sometimes leaving motorists trapped in their cars under live electric lines. 

Microbursts are a serious threat to aircraft especially when they are close to the ground during landing or takeoff.  An inattentive pilot encountering headwinds at Point 1 might cut back on the power.  Very quickly the plane would lose the headwinds (Point 2) and then encounter tailwinds (Point 3).  The plane might lose altitude so quickly that it would crash into the ground before corrective action could be taken.  Microburst associated wind shear was largely responsible for the crash of Delta Airlines Flight 191 while landing at the Dallas Fort Worth airport on Aug. 2, 1985.
 
Falling rain could warn of a wet microburst (see photo below).   In other cases, dangerous dry microburst winds might be invisible (the virga, evaporating rain, will cool the air, make the air more dense, and strengthen the downdraft winds).






Here are a couple of microburst videos from YouTube.  The first video was taken in the heavy rain and strong winds under a thunderstorm in the microburst.  You'll see a power pole snapped in half by the microburst winds at about 2:26 into the video.  The 2nd video was taken in or near San Tan AZ.  The microburst doesn't look too impressive at the start of the footage but the storm winds soon get pretty violent and cause some damage.
The following material wasn't covered in class on Monday.  I'll come back to it briefly at the start of class on Wednesday.




A sketch and a photograph of a shelf cloud.  Warm moist air if lifted by the cold air behind the gust front which is moving from left to right.  The shelf cloud is very close to the ground, so the warm air must have been very moist because it didn't have to rise very far before it had cooled enough to become saturated and form a cloud.  Here are a couple of pretty good videos of shelf clouds (Grand Haven, MI and Massillon, OH)

And here's a video that shows both a thick dust cloud at the leading edge of an approaching gust front and a shelf cloud.


Here's the answer to a question embedded in today's notes.


The first 3 pictures shows the different stages in the lifetime of an air mass thunderstorm.  There's a tilted updraft in the 4th picture which is a characteristic of a severe thunderstorm.