A case of offshore convective initiation by interacting land breezes near Darwin, Australia

K Wapler; TP Lane

Journal article

A case of offshore convective initiation by interacting land breezes near Darwin, Australia

K Wapler, TP Lane

Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics | Published : 2012

DOI: 10.1007/s00703-011-0180-6

Abstract

A case of offshore convective initiation by interacting land breezes near Darwin, Australia is investigated using convection-permitting model simulations, radar-derived precipitation observations, thermodynamic profiles from radiosonde soundings and surface measurements. These analyses elucidate the convergence of two land breezes in the Van Diemen Gulf, one originating from the Tiwi Islands and the other from mainland Australia; the convergence is sufficient to initiate a line of convection that forms parallel to the mainland coast in the early morning. While differing in small-scale features, the modeled system shows reasonably good agreement with the observed precipitation accumulations. ..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Todd Lane Author

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Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council

Funding Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects (DP0770381) and Future Fellowship (FT0990892) funding schemes. Computing facilities were provided by the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing. We would like to thank Michael Whimpey for providing the radar data. The satellite image was obtained from http://angler.larc.nasa.gov/prod/twpice/visst-pixel-gif/mtsat.. This study has benefited from the authors' discussions with Peter May, Christian Jakob, Michael Manton, and Steve Siems. We also want to thank the reviewers for their useful comments that helped improve the manuscript.