Andrew Russell
The Convective Storm Iniation Project
The main field campaign of the Convective Storm Initiation Project
(CSIP) was undertaken in the southern UK during June, July and
August 2005. The overall goal of CSIP was to improve the
understanding and prediction of convective showers and storms. This
problem was approached by intensively observing such events as they
developed over the southern UK. Data was collected from many
sources, including radar, lidar, sodar, aircraft-borne instruments
and a network of automatic weather stations and radiosondes.
One of the triggers/amplifiers of convection that was a particular focus of the CSIP campaign in 2005 was the influence of upper-level forcings on convection. Upper-level forcing of convection principally takes the form of potential-vorticity (PV) anomalies, where stratospheric air intrudes into the troposphere. It has been shown that the convection associated with PV anomalies occurs as a result of an increase in the local generation of potential instability. The first major result from this work shows how the generation and motion of upper-level features that help to force convection is intwinned with lower level features that inhibit convection. This work has been submitted to the Qauterly Journal of the RMetS and I have also summarised the main points from the investigation on this page: Summary of "Convective inhibition beneath an upper-level feature" I have also provided a page with references of all published and forthcoming CSIP publications that I am aware of; there may be more. For more info on CSIP, see my links page and I will eventually put a copy of my first paper on this subject on the publications page. I suppose it is also of interest that during the field campaign we were featured on the Hampshire Meridian news, the Channel 4 news and there were two articles in the Telegraph (the text of the first of these articles can be seen here and a pdf of the second article is here). |
