Plains Elevated Convection at Night (PECAN) Experiment Science Plan
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
- NCAR
- Department of Atmospheric Science, University of Wyoming
The Plains Elevated Convection at Night (PECAN) experiment is a large field campaign that is being supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with contributions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Atmospheric and Space Administration (NASA), and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The overarching goal of the PECAN experiment is to improve the understanding and simulation of the processes that initiate and maintain convection and convective precipitation at night over the central portion of the Great Plains region of the United States (Parsons et al. 2013). These goals are important because (1) a large fraction of the yearly precipitation in the Great Plains comes from nocturnal convection, (2) nocturnal convection in the Great Plains is most often decoupled from the ground and, thus, is forced by other phenomena aloft (e.g., propagating bores, frontal boundaries, low-level jets [LLJ], etc.), (3) there is a relative lack of understanding how these disturbances initiate and maintain nocturnal convection, and (4) this lack of understanding greatly hampers the ability of numerical weather and climate models to simulate nocturnal convection well. This leads to significant uncertainties in predicting the onset, location, frequency, and intensity of convective cloud systems and associated weather hazards over the Great Plains.
- Research Organization:
- DOE Office of Science Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC05-7601830
- OSTI ID:
- 1232673
- Report Number(s):
- DOE/SC-ARM-14-035
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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