Assimilation of Radar Data. Forecasts of Three Gust Front Cases Andrew Crook and John D. Tuttle Monthly Weather Review. Vol 122, No 6, 1994. The simulations are initialized with radar-derived winds and, for the two cases in 1992, measurements from a surface mesonet.
Thermodynamic retrieval is used to calculate the buoyancy in the boundary layer.
The sensitivity of the retrieved buoyancy to the various constraints of real data was examined in Part I of this study. For the second and third cases, data from a 50 station surface mesonet were also available. In the second case, two gust fronts converged in the region of Mile High Radar, but failed to generate significant convection. In the third case, three gust fronts converged and generated strong convection. Numerical simulations for both of these cases using surface and radar-derived winds are presented.