The Kinematics of a Midlatitude, Continental Mesoscale Convective System and Its Mesoscale Vortex

Abstract

The authors present a unique, scale-discriminating study of the environment-relative circulations within a mesoscale convective system (MCS) and mesoscale convective vortex (MCV). The MCS, a leading convective line and trailing stratiform region that became asymmetric, passed through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Profiler Network (NPN) in Kansas and Oklahoma on 1 August 1996. The MCV appeared in the MCS's stratiform region just prior to the system's mature stage and grew to a depth of over 12 km as the MCS dissipated. The MCV did not apparently survive to the next day. A spatial bandpass filter was used to divide observed wind into a component that was predominantly synoptic background wind and a component that was predominantly a mesoscale perturbation on that background wind. A mesoscale updraft, mesoscale downdraft, and divergent outflows in the lower and upper troposphere were evident after the synoptic background wind was removed, so these four circulations were internal and fundamental to the MCS. The mesoscale perturbation in wind in the middle troposphere extended farther behind the MCS than ahead of it, consistent with analytic studies and numerical simulations of gravity waves generated by heat sources characteristic of MCSs with leading convective lines and trailing stratiform regions. Deepening of the MCV appeared to be reflected in the vertical wind shear at the vortex's center: as the MCV strengthened, the mesoscale shear through its lower part decreased, perhaps as wind became more vortical at increasing altitudes. Mesoscale and synoptic vertical shears were of similar magnitude, so an average of environmental soundings outside an MCS probably does not accurately represent the shear that affects an MCV. This suggests the need to reevaluate how the kinematical settings of MCVs are diagnosed.