COOPERATIVE INSTITUTE FOR MESOSCALE METEOROLOGICAL STUDIES (CIMMS)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS DURING CALENDAR YEAR 1997

INFRASTRUCTURAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS

•  
• The high level of CIMMS scientific activity during 1997 was facilitated by the infrastructural consolidation of 1996, and especially involved increased research and development within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) units participating in CIMMS. In particular, much research and development took place within the research themes of Doppler Weather Radar Research and Development (newly added in 1995) and Basic Convective and Mesoscale Research. This research involved collaborations between CIMMS and federal employees at the Environmental Research Laboratories' National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) and the three National Weather Service (NWS) units on the University of Oklahoma (OU) campus (Weather Forecast Office; WSR-88D Operational Support Facility, OSF; and Storm Prediction Center, SPC).

•  
• The broadening of the CIMMS MOA in 1995 has continued to be reflected in the increased involvement of CIMMS scientists, engineers, and support personnel in the programs of the NSSL (86 individuals, who now substantially outnumber the Laboratory's 52 federal employees), WSR-88D OSF (11), and SPC (3). This level of activity constitutes a ten-fold increase from five years ago, and the infrastructural challenges that have resulted are now being successfully addressed.

PROGRAM REVIEWS

•  
• On October 21, CIMMS programs were subject to a full review by the Director and Deputy Director of NOAA's Environmental Research Laboratories, the Manager of NOAA's Joint Institute Program, and the Chief Scientist of the National Weather Service's Office of Meteorology. Two additional non-NOAA reviewers were also included in the Review Team -- Dr. Eugene M. Rasmusson, Senior Research Associate in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Maryland; and Dr. Mitchell W. Moncrieff, Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and co-leader of NCAR's Clouds and Climate Program. The outcome of the review was highly favorable, both programmatically and scientifically.

INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITIES

•  
• The following activities occurred under a Memorandum of Agreement between CIMMS and the Moroccan Direction de la Météorologie Nationale (DMN) -- one DMN meteorological engineer was at CIMMS during the month of April to participate (because of the permission of the NWS Director) in the final OSF Doppler Radar Training Course; another DMN meteorological engineer was at CIMMS for the second half of the year, performing further research into the causes and predictability of Moroccan growing season precipitation (Al Moubarak Project); the CIMMS Director visited Morocco in July to update a range of Moroccan Government officials on the status of the Al Moubarak Project; in September, the CIMMS Director and OU Regents' Professor of Meteorology Kenneth C. Crawford submitted proposals to DMN for the continuation of the Al Moubarak Project and initiation of a new Nowcasting Project, respectively; on November 1, CIMMS and DMN issued an "Experimental Precipitation Prediction for Morocco for 1997-98", most of which has verified well thus far.

•  
• CIMMS continued to play the lead role at OU during 1997 concerning the Hitachi SR2201 Massively Parallel Processor that was donated by Hitachi Ltd. in 1996. The progress of several research projects in the areas of meteorology and geophysics has been greatly accelerated by use of this compact but powerful machine. Once additional peripherals are added to the SR2201, the machine will be more widely used within science and engineering at OU.

•  
• CIMMS' activities in Subsaharan Africa expanded further during 1997. The CIMMS Director visited the African Center of Meteorological Applications for Development (ACMAD, Niamey, Niger) in July, as an Invited Lecturer for its "First Regional Training Course on Practical Applications of Seasonal-to-Interannual Climate Predictions for Decision-Making in Agriculture and Water Resources Management in Africa". While at ACMAD, he and the ACMAD Director-General prepared a proposal for CIMMS-ACMAD collaboration within the "ACMAD Core Demonstration Project in Climate Prediction". The International Activities Office of the U.S. National Weather Service has now funded this proposal. The CIMMS Director also participated in International Workshops in Subsaharan Africa on "Weather and Climate-Based Technologies to Benefit Water Resources Management" (Pretoria, South Africa, April) and "Climate Variability, Prediction, Water Resources and Agricultural Productivity: Food Security Issues in Subsaharan Africa" (Cotonou, Bénin, July). A Visiting Research Associate from the Drought Monitoring Center/Kenya Meteorological Department was in residence at CIMMS for all of 1997, performing research into the predictability of the East African rainy seasons.

•  
• In addition to the above collaborations, CIMMS Scientists are actively working with counterparts at Ben-Gurion University (Israel), the Instituto per lo studio delle Metodologie Geofisiche Ambientali (IMGA, Italy), the National Climate Center and Institute of Atmospheric Physics (P. R. China), the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (Russia), the Queensland Department of Primary Industry (Australia), the Australian Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre, and the Canadian Atmospheric Environmental Service.

NATIONAL FIELD PROGRAM LEADERSHIP

•  
• As part of our Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Site Scientist role, CIMMS Scientists continue to provide vital day-to-day scientific guidance for the development and continuous operation of the Southern Great Plains ARM Site. This is the World's first comprehensive climate observatory, and now generates ~250 continuous data streams from 30 locations spread over 55,000 square miles in southern Kansas and northern and central Oklahoma. During 1997, the Site Scientist Team assumed increased responsibilities with respect to the quality assurance of the above data streams, and in the planning, execution, and initial analysis phases of several Intensive Observing Periods (IOPs). The most notable of these IOPs was a fall 1997 field program that featured experiments in the areas of atmospheric aerosols, cloud physics, water vapor, and shortwave radiation. CIMMS staff were instrumental in the success of this large IOP.

•  
• CIMMS Fellows and Scientists continued to analyze data collected during the 1994-95 Verification of the Origin of Rotation in Tornadoes EXperiment (VORTEX) across the Southern Great Plains, for which they had also designed and built several special, mobile, observing systems. Dr. Erik Rasmussen, a CIMMS Research Scientist, was bestowed the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 1997 for his pioneering work in VORTEX. VORTEX case studies continue to yield important new information about tornadogenesis that has been reported in 10 formal publications in scientific journals so far, and is being further documented in a similar number of additional papers that are in various stages of preparation. This work will also be translated into improved forecast skill for this devastating phenomenon. A number of CIMMS staff were involved in a follow-up field program in May-June 1997 called Sub-VORTEX, which sought to fill unmet observational needs left by VORTEX.

•  
• CIMMS scientists completed installation of instrumentation that is now contributing to the routine monitoring of soil water and temperature across the Southern Great Plains. The approximately 80-station network will be the world-leader for the regional-scale monitoring of these important environmental parameters. This effort is part of the World Climate Programme’s Global Energy and Water Cycle EXperiment (GEWEX), as well as the aforementioned international ARM Program of the U.S. Department of Energy, and is being undertaken in collaboration with the Oklahoma Mesonet. This network was an essential part of a U.S. Department of Agriculture/NASA field program (Southern Great Plains '97), conducted during the summer of 1997, to establish that retrieval algorithms for surface soil moisture developed at higher spatial resolution using surface- and aircraft-based sensors can be extended to the coarser resolutions expected from satellite platforms. CIMMS and NSSL scientists participated in this experiment, including through the deployment of a tethersonde to profile boundary layer properties.

•  
• In collaboration with NSSL and the OU School of Meteorology, CIMMS successfully administered the operations of the Joint Mobile Research Facility (JMRF) during its first year of existence in 1997. The JMRF coordinates the development and deployment of the mobile observing capabilities of those units, including the mobile Doppler radars. This facility is expected to increase the efficiency of field programs at the national and international levels, which will ultimately be reflected in improved forecast skill for severe weather.
•  
• CIMMS scientists were also involved in the CASES (Cooperative Atmosphere-Surface Exchange Study) field program in May-June 1997 in south central Kansas. The goal of this program was to examine the performance of a polarimetric algorithm for rainfall estimation using the NCAR S-POL dual-polarization radar.

•  
• CIMMS staff at NSSL and OSF have been instrumental in the installation of RIDDS (Radar Ingest and Data Distribution System) at NWS WSR-88D installations across the country. RIDDS is a Sun SPARC5 workstation that connects to a WSR-88D to provide external research facilities, forecast offices, and certain government agencies with a real-time link to weather radar data. This has permitted the deployment of NSSL's WDSS (Warning Decision Support System) at weather forecast offices to help field meteorologists analyze severe weather events and give timely warnings. It has also facilitated the development of a new airport terminal weather center in conjunction with the Federal Aviation Authority's Lincoln Laboratories, along with the development of SCAN (System for Convective Analysis and Nowcasting) with NCAR.

SCIENTIFIC INNOVATION AND ACTIVITY

•  
• A graduate-level text on The Electrical Nature of Storms was completed in late 1997 (for publication by Oxford University Press in early 1998) by CIMMS Resident Fellow Dr. Donald R. MacGorman and CIMMS Fellow Dr. W. David Rust; high recognition of pioneering work on the use of polarimetric radar data to improve rainfall estimation was given to CIMMS Research Scientist Dr. Alexander Ryzhkov and CIMMS Fellow Dr. Dusan Zrnic by the World Meteorological Organization (Vilho Vaisala Award); and CIMMS Fellow Dr. David Stensrud received word in late 1997 that he was to receive the American Meteorological Society's Clarence Leroy Meisinger Award in January 1998, for his innovative research into the structure, dynamics, and predictability of mesoscale convective systems and their impact on larger scales.

•  
• The following areas of CIMMS research activity were particularly prominent during 1997 -development and implementation of a three-dimensional Monte Carlo model within the CIMMS three-dimensional Large Eddy Simulation XMP model to study radiative transfer in inhomogeneous cloud media; development of generalized adjoint formulations to deal with various complex situations in numerical prediction models; development and evaluation of a shallow convection parameterization for mesoscale meteorological models; improvement of quantitative precipitation forecasting for the 1-2 day forecast period; scientific training of NWS staff on new techniques for winter weather prediction; development of a detection algorithm for bounded weak echo regions and its testing as part of NSSL's Warning Decision Support System (WDSS); investigation of the relationships between tropical Pacific sea surface temperature anomaly events and regional climate patterns; examination of the climatic importance of low-level jets over the Southern Great Plains and a mid-tropospheric jet over West Africa; research on and deployment of state-of-the-art devices for the in situ measurement of water vapor; investigation of the occurrence of freezing temperatures in the southeastern U.S. and their relationship with insurance claims and losses due to pipe bursting; documentation of the evolution of the El Niño of 1997-1998 and its possible effects on the property insurance industry, the results of which were published in an insurance industry White Paper and explained to 80 of its top executives from across the nation in a day-long Workshop in Washington, DC; development of a number of severe storm detection algorithms for the WSR-88D radar, including those for storm-scale vortices, tornadoes, hail, and damaging downbursts; and the integration of such severe storm detection algorithms into the daily forecasting regimen of the NWS and the Federal Aviation Administration.

•  
• During 1997, the external funding for CIMMS totaled $4+ million, and supported research that was reported in nearly 50 refereed journal articles (published or accepted for publication) and many further articles that appeared in conference and workshop Proceedings.

•  
• During 1997, CIMMS Scientists and Fellows presented invited papers and lectures at international and national meetings in Copenhagen (Denmark), Niamey (Niger), Cotonou (Bénin), and Washington, DC (several), and gave contributed papers at meetings in a number of U.S. cities.