Welcome to REAL Observations over an Urban Area

7 May 2004

The following animation results from the Raman-shifted Eye-safe Aerosol Lidar (REAL) scanning horizontally just above rooftop and treetop level in Washington DC on 7 May 2004. The range-corrected backscatter intensity has been high-pass median filtered in the radial dimension to eliminate large scale radial trends in the data. It shows an outflow boundary (density current resulting from the outflow of a distant thunderstorm) moving through the lidar's observation area approximately half way through the animation (from 19:20 to 19:25 UTC). An AMS conference publication on the event is described in:

Mayor, S. D., B. M. Morley, S. M. Spuler, S. C. Himmelsbach, D. Flanigan, T. M. Weckwerth, and T. Warner, 2007: Elastic Backscatter lidar observations of a gust front passage over Washington D.C. on 7 May 2004. Paper 9.7 in the Seventh Symposium on the Urban Environment, American Meteorological Society, 10-13 Sept. 2007, San Diego.


Doppler Lidar data from this same case is discussed in:
Newsom, R., D. Ligon, D. Garvey: 200X: DUAL-DOPPLER LIDAR OBSERVATIONS OVER WASHINGTON DC