This paper presents an automated approach for classifying storm type from weather radar reflectivity using decision trees. Recent research indicates a strong relationship between storm type (morphology) and severe weather, and such information can aid in the warning process. Furthermore, new adaptive sensing tools, such as the Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere’s (CASA’...

Ten years of Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission precipitation radar data are used to study the physical properties of the precipitating cloud systems that account for the summer rainfall of tropical and subtropical South America. Radar echoes in the continental subtropics tend to be of an intensely convective nature, especially at the eastern foothills of the Andes where diurnally forced deep ...

Precipitation changes can affect society more directly than variations in most other meteorological observables1–3, but precipitation is difficult to characterize because of fluctuations on nearly all temporal and spatial scales. In addition, the intensity of extreme precipitation rises markedly at higher temperature4–9, faster than the rate of increase in the atmosphere’s water-holding capacit...

The evolution of a small, vigorous mesoscale convective system (MCS) over northern Alabama is described using Doppler radar, GOES satellite, surface mesonet, lightning, and sounding data. The MCS formed near noon in a relatively unstable environment having weak synoptic forcing and weak shear. The initiation of separate lines and clusters of deep convection occurred in regions exhibiting cumulu...

Apache Spark is one of the most widely used open source processing engines for big data, with rich language-integrated APIs and a wide range of libraries. Over the past two years, our group has worked to deploy Spark to a wide range of organizations through consulting relationships as well as our hosted service, Databricks. We describe the main challenges and requirements that appeared in takin...

In the recent AIPS98 Planning Competition, the hsp planner , based on a forward state search and a suitable domain-independent heuristic, showed that heuristic search planners can be competitive with state of the art Graphplan and Satissability planners. hsp solved more problems than the other planners but often took more time or produced longer plans. The bottleneck in hsp is the computation o...

Precipitation is a key component of the hydrological cycle, which critical to understanding its formation and evolution. In this study, based on observation data PWS100 located at meteorological site terminal Urumqi Glacier No. 1, eastern Tianshan Mountains, statistical characteristics summer raindrop size distribution (DSD) were analyzed, DSD five different rainfall rates(R) two types (convect...

The variability of rainfall and drop size distributions (DSDs) as a function of large-scale atmospheric conditions and storm characteristics is investigated using measurements from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program (ARM) facility at Darwin, Australia. Observations are obtained from an impact disdrometer with a near continuous record of operation over five consecutive wet seasons (20...

The quest to understand the variation of rainfall microstructures at subtropical and equatorial regions is vital to rain attenuation studies. In this study, point rainfall datasets obtained at Butare (2◦36′S, 29◦44′E) and Durban (29◦52′S, 30◦58′E), are compared at the reflectivity threshold of 38 dBZ. Joss-Walvogel (JW) distrometer measurements collected from these two locations represent physi...