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Quantifying Tropopause-Overshooting Volume from Satellite and Radar Observations during DCOTSS 2021 and 2022 Campaigns
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  • Kyle Frederick Itterly,
  • Kristopher M. Bedka,
  • Cameron R. Homeyer,
  • Konstantin V. Khlopenkov
Kyle Frederick Itterly
Analytical Mechanics Associates
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Kristopher M. Bedka
NASA Langley Research Center

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Cameron R. Homeyer
University of Oklahoma
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Konstantin V. Khlopenkov
Science Systems and Applications
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Abstract

This study quantifies the air volume injected into the stratosphere by overshooting convection detected by GOES-16/17 geostationary infrared imagery and NOAA NEXRAD precipitation echo top during the 2021 and 2022 Dynamics and Chemistry of the Summer Stratosphere (DCOTSS) missions. This analysis seeks to address a key DCOTSS science question, namely “How much tropospheric air and water is irreversibly injected into the stratosphere by convection?” A novel method for defining individual storms or a cluster of adjacent storms as objects and tracking them throughout their lifetime facilitates the analysis. Overshooting convection injected 2,178,154 - 5,360,162 km3 of air into the stratosphere in 2021 and 6,017,486 – 10,642,008 km3 in 2022 over the North American study domain with GOES being higher than GridRad during both years. GOES overshooting detections were more uncertain due to difficulty differentiating updrafts from adjacent broad areas of cold outflow. Overshooting volume from the top 10 storm objects each year contributed 37 to 52% of the total domain wide volume. Total object-lifetime volume from these top 10 events ranged from ~90,000-790,000 km3 for GOES and ~49,000-560,000 km3 for GridRad. It was found that overshooting seldomly exceeded 5% of the total anvil area, demonstrating that very small regions within convection are responsible for impacting stratosphere composition. Despite differences in overshooting characteristics by the two sensors, airmasses initiated from GOES and NEXRAD overshooting and advected forward in time had similar spatial and vertical distributions, indicating that geostationary satellite data could be used to study the long-range transport of overshooting airmasses.
10 Sep 2024Submitted to ESS Open Archive
17 Sep 2024Published in ESS Open Archive