PNNL

Abstract

Vertical velocity distribution below cloud is one of the key determinants of cloud life cycle, but observations of this variable are extremely sparse in space. Doppler lidar retrievals and large-eddy simulations at the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement facility Southern Great Plains site are used to determine whether vertical velocity statistics from temporally dense profiles at a single location can be substituted for spatial vertical velocity statistics. We show that even a small number (5) of widely distributed [?? (1?) latitude/longitude spacing] lidars is sufficient sampling to reconstruct domain-wide spatial vertical velocity variance, but not higher moments of the vertical velocity distribution. Spatial and temporal vertical velocity variance in the Doppler lidar observations are nearly interchangeable as long as the spatial variance is temporally averaged and the temporal variance is averaged across lidars. This is true even though the dominant spatial scales of vertical velocity variability are