Jake
Posted by JAC on 6/30/2010, 10:51 pm
Sorry, I got side tracked for a while.

Actually seen it many times.

RI comes when a hot-tower fires on the eyewall.

Two indications of a hot tower are extremely high rain rates and a cumulus nimbus that shoots very high above the cirrus canopy.

For altitude, the bar is 15km.  Anything above that is considered a hot tower.

The mechanism is rapid latent heat release into the core due to rapid condensation directly adjacent to the core.

There is a lot of literature covering hot-towers.

I was also reading a paper on high theta-e measurements made by dropsondes in the eye and on the eyewall that correlate to RI.

If interested I can pass these along.

Let me know if you would like to see them.

As a side note, one of the pioneers in hot-tower research died a few months ago.

We had a thread going on here about her.

She helped design the TRMM satellite which has a down-looking precipitation radar that was specifically designed to ID hot-towers.

One mechanism that may have sparked the hot-tower this afternoon was an influx of very unstable air from Mexico.

I noticed there was not a lot of cloud cover ahead of Alex and that helped to heat the ground and destabilize the air to a high degree.

I didn't get a sounding today, but yesterday I was seeing CAPE's of greater than 4000 over the Mexican coast in the afternoon.




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948mb - Chris in Tampa, 6/30/2010, 8:09 pm
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