PECAN: Plains Elevated Convection at Night

Summary

The PECAN campaign is envisioned as a multi-agency, international project (NSF, NOAA, NASA, DOE; Canada, Germany, UK) designed to advance the understanding of continental nocturnal warm-season precipitation. PECAN will focus on nocturnal convection in conditions with a low-level jet and a stable boundary layer with the largest Convectively Available Potential Energy located aloft. The findings should be applicable to other continental regions with nocturnal thunderstorm maxima. PECAN has four research foci: i) Nocturnal convection initiation and early evolution of mesoscale convective clusters; ii) Bore and other wave-like disturbances; iii) Dynamics and microphysics of nocturnal mesoscale convective systems (MCSs); iv) Prediction of nocturnal convection initiation and evolution. To investigate these foci, the PECAN campaign calls for three aircraft with the NSF-University of Wyoming King Air and the NASA DC-8 probing the pre-convective environment, and the NOAA P-3 observing the dynamical and microphysical characteristics of MCSs. The project design includes a network of seven mobile Doppler radars (3 Center for Severe Weather Research X-band DOWs, 2  University of Oklahoma C-band SMART-Rs, the NSSL X-band NOXP, and the Univ. of Alabama in Huntsville X-band MAX) that will provide multi-Doppler wind syntheses and  microphysical data of evolving MCSs, and a fixed S-band radar, the NCAR S-Pol radar. A unique aspect of the experimental design is the integration of a wide variety of profiling systems into a fixed and mobile PECAN Integrated Sounding Array (PISA) including Differential Absorption Lidars, Doppler lidars, and Raman lidars, multi-channel microwave radiometers, infrared spectrometers, and acoustic systems, as well as radiosondes and surface meteorological stations.