A Radar Wind Analysis System for Nowcast Applications

Figure 7

Background wind fields (a) at = 2 km superimposed on the dealiased radial-velocity images and (b) at = 4 km superimposed on the reflectivity images scanned at 0.5° tilt from six radars (KTLX, KFDR, KINX, KVNX, KSRX, and TOKC) around 1900 UTC on May 20, 2013. The background winds are plotted every 20 km in - and -directions by the white (<25 m s⁻¹), yellow (between 25 and 30 m s⁻¹), and red (>30 m s⁻¹) arrows with the color scales shown in the first bar on the top of each panel, while the second bar on the top of (a) (or (b)) shows the color scales for the radial-velocity images (or reflectivity images). Each radar site is marked by a blue dot with the radar name in (a). The dealiased radial-velocity image from TOKC is plotted atop the image from KTLX and the latter is plotted atop the image from KFDR in (a). Because of this, the image from KTLX is mostly covered by the image from TOKC except for the two green patches marked by the yellow letters K1 and K2 to the southwest of the KTLX radar site (beyond the 50 km radial range), while the scattered red image along the southern edge of the second green patch (marked by the yellow letter K2) was scanned from KFDR. In (b), the white letter S marks the supercell that was further intensified during the next two hours, while the white letter E marks the emerging storm cell that developed into a supercell and generated a devastating tornado over the Moore area in the central Oklahoma in the subsequent 1 hour (around 2000 UTC). The analysis domain size is 800 × 800 × 10 km³. The green lines plot the county boundaries.

(a)

(b)