MITTEN-CI: Maritime to Inland Transitions Towards ENvironments for Convection Initiation

Summary

The goal of the MITTEN-CI campaign is to develop the most thorough understanding to date of transitions in warm season boundary layer thermodynamic and kinematic structure due to inland advection of the marine atmospheric boundary layer (MBL) in the Great Lakes coastal environment, and resultant impacts on convection initiation (CI) or failure thereof. Understanding such transitions and their convective implications has substantial broader impacts, given the significant portion of the human population that lives in coastal areas. The MITTEN-CI campaign will result in an extensive dataset that characterizes the evolution of over-lake thermodynamic and kinematic profiles using Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS), in addition to thorough sampling of boundary layer spatial and temporal variability over land using instrumentation along a 120 km long shore-perpendicular transect with six flux towers, two mobile mesonets, a fixed radiosonde system, a mobile Windsond system, a Doppler LiDAR, and two mobile Ka-band Doppler radars.