MITTEN-CI

Why It Matters - Many communities situated around the Great Lakes experience shifts between lake-influenced and inland air masses that strongly affect when storms form or fail to develop.  This research improves the ability to predict hazardous convection in lake-influenced environments.

The goal of the Maritime to Inland Transitions Towards ENvironments for Convection Initiation (MITTEN-CI) campaign was to develop the most thorough understanding to date of transitions in near-surface thermodynamic and wind profile structure due to inland movement of marine air in the Great Lakes coastal environment, and resultant impacts on thunderstorm development. Understanding such transitions and their implications for thunderstorms has substantial broader impacts, given the significant portion of the human population that lives in coastal areas. Hypotheses are developed to target novel aspects of near-shore thunderstorm development and evolution of near-surface profiles of temperature, humidity, and wind that have received relatively little attention and enable operations under a wide range of background weather patterns, resulting in a high probability of success in the campaign’s goals.

The MITTEN-CI campaign will result in an extensive dataset that characterizes the temporal evolution of over-lake thermodynamic and kinematic profiles using Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS), in addition to thorough sampling of boundary layer spatial and temporal variability over land using instrumentation along a 120 km shore-perpendicular transect with six flux towers, two mobile mesonets, multiple radiosonde launch sites, a Doppler LiDAR, and two mobile Ka-band Doppler radars. These data will enable hypothesis testing that will result in new knowledge of processes across a range of scales that result in convection initiation (CI) or failure thereof in midlatitude coastal regions.