Dynamical and microphysical retrievals from Doppler radar observations of a deep convective cloud

Data of a severe thunderstorm observed during the Cooperative Huntsville Meteorological Experiment project were assimilated and results compared to a conventional analysis. The analysis system was able to retrieve all the prominent features of the storm, but differed in some of the details.

However, the consistency of this retrieval dataset lent credence to the results. It was found that the algorithm was very sensitive to several coefficients in the microphysical and turbulence parameterizations. Simulations proved to be unable to reproduce the evolution of the observed storm even with parameterization coefficients set at values that produce reasonable storm evolutions.