Summary

The Midlatitude Continental Convective Cloud Experiment (MC3E) was a collaborative effort between the NASA Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission Ground Validation (GV) program and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility. Conducted in the spring of 2011, MC3E was centered in north-central Oklahoma, USA. The overarching goal of the field campaign was to collect a comprehensive set of observations describing precipitation microphysics over continents during the warm season. The observations will be used to refine GPM retrieval algorithms over land. At the same time, DOE objectives focused on relating the cloud microphysical observations to accompanying observations of cloud kinematics and the surrounding environment. These observations will be used to improve the understanding and representation of cloud and precipitation microphysical interactions within cloud-resolving models.