Date of Award

1-1-2019

Language

English

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

College/School/Department

Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences

Content Description

1 online resource (xii, 82 pages) : color illustrations, color maps.

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Christopher D Thorncroft

Keywords

cold pool, mesonet, observations, squall line, thunderstorm, Squall lines, Severe storms, Mesospheric circulation, Atmospheric temperature

Subject Categories

Atmospheric Sciences | Meteorology

Abstract

The recently finished New York State Mesonet (NYSM) has a network of 126 standard surface sites and 17 vertical profiler sites across the state. This high density network allows for a wide range of potential uses in research and operational forecasting. One such use is in the area of severe thunderstorm forecasting, where mesoscale and storm scale features can become highly important. This thesis examines three case studies, events from 2017-2018 that produced long-lived, high impact squall lines which moved across the state. As the squall line’s cold pool has long been recognized to play a critical role in squall line evolution and maintenance (Rotunno et al 1988), several metrics are used to analyze each cold pool’s behavior using the NYSM standard sites while the vertical structure of the cold pools were analyzed using the profiler sites. The surface cold pool metrics are then correlated to metrics of damaging wind potential in the squall line, to find any potential relationship that may aide in short term forecasting.

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