P40 The characteristics of mesoscale cellular convection in the marine atmospheric boundary layer

Guo, Lanli, Dalhousie University, Canada

Convection is an important phenomenon in the marine atmospheric boundary layer (MABL). It produces coherent perturbations in the wind, temperature, and humidity and contributes significantly to the vertical MABL fluxes of heat, momentum, and humidity. The polarimetric characteristics of mesoscale cellular convection (MCC) in the MABL was investigated by using high resolution data from fully polarimetric (HH, VV, HV, and VH) RADARSAT-2 (RS-2) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. In this study, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) version 3.2 atmospheric model was used to investigate the synoptic meteorological processes related to the SAR image and to confirm that the signals in the SAR imagery are mesoscale cellular convection (MCC). WRF was implemented with one-way nested domains telescoping from 10, 3.33, and 1.11 km horizontal grid resolutions. NARR data were used as the initial and boundary data for WRF model simulations.