The field phase of RELAMPAGO was conducted from 1 November–16 December 2018, over two relatively small (approximately 1° latitude × 1° longitude) domains: west central Argentina in the general vicinity of the Sierras de Córdoba mountains (hereinafter, SDC Fig. The detailed justification for RELAMPAGO-CACTI, as well as a comprehensive review of the supporting literature, can be found in Nesbitt et al. 2016), and the complementary Clouds, Aerosols, and Complex Terrain Interactions (CACTI) field program funded by the Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (DOE-ARM) program ( ). Great Plains, and relatively sparse knowledge about these convective storms owing to the scarcity of ground-based measurements, motivated the Remote sensing of Electrification, Lightning, And Mesoscale/microscale Processes with Adaptive Ground Observations (RELAMPAGO) field program, funded primarily by the National Science Foundation ( Nesbitt et al. Such impact, the high frequency of convection initiation (CI) and subsequent development of hazardous weather over a relatively small area in Argentina as compared to that of the U.S. In Argentina specifically, thunderstorm-generated hazards adversely impact a largely urban population of 45 million people, yet the thunderstorm-generated rainfall is also critical for agricultural production, which is one of the country’s economic pillars. 2019), and often are accompanied by extreme lightning activity and flooding (e.g., Rasmussen et al.

2006), are prolific hail producers ( Cecil and Blankenship 2012 Mezher et al. Satellite observations suggest that thunderstorms in southeast South America are among the most intense and deepest in the world ( Zipser et al. Such a motion and short residence time would limit the upward tilting, by the left-moving supercell updraft, of the storm-relative, antistreamwise horizontal vorticity associated with anabatic flow near complex terrain. Sounding observations as well as model simulations indicate that a mountain-perpendicular storm motion results in a relatively short storm residence time within the narrow zone of terrain-enhanced vertical wind shear. Specifically, the IOP4 supercell and other short-duration supercell cases presented had storm motions that were nearly perpendicular to the long axis of the Sierras de Córdoba Mountains a long-duration supercell case, on the other hand, had a storm motion nearly parallel to these mountains. Additional data collected within the RELAMPAGO domain revealed other storms with this behavior, which appears to be attributable in part to effects of the local terrain. However, retrieved 3D winds from dual-Doppler radar scans were used to document a high spatial correspondence between midlevel vertical velocity and vertical vorticity in this storm, thus providing evidence to support the supercell categorization. In contrast to the archetypal supercell described in the Glossary of Meteorology, the updraft rotation in this storm was rather short lived (~25 min), causing some initial doubt as to whether this indeed was a supercell. On 10 November 2018, during the RELAMPAGO field campaign in Argentina, South America, a thunderstorm with supercell characteristics was observed by an array of mobile observing instruments, including three Doppler on Wheels radars.

Weather dual doppler radar in motion