Composition and Thermal Structure of the Upper Troposphere and Lower Stratosphere in a Penetrating Mesoscale Convective Complex Determined by Satellite Observations and Model Simulations

Figure 2

Observations from satellites at 18:00 GMT on 8 June 2009. (a) Outgoing longwave radiation (OLR, W·m⁻²) from the AIRS instrument (the middle thick red line is the orbit of MLS, CPR, and CALIOP instruments). (b) Black-body temperature contours from the FY2C satellite (green, blue, red, and black contours denote −20, −32, −50, and −65°C, resp.). (c) Cross-section of radar reflectivity from CPR (dBZ, color-shaded) and the potential pseudo equivalent temperature (K, black contours) along orbit. (d) Cross-section of data from the CALIOP instrument; left-hand -axis shows the tropopause height (black dots) and the cloud top height (blue and cyan dots; cyan for overshooting cloud top) and the right-hand -axis shows the integrated attenuated backscatter coefficients in the top cloud layer (red dots, sr⁻¹·km⁻¹).

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)