A. Mugnai1, F. Iocca1, L. Guerrieri1, J. F. Turk4, G. J. Tripoli5, and E. A. Smith6
1Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences, CNR, Bologna, Roma, Lecce - Italy
2ARPA Regional Meteorological Service, Bologna - Italy
3Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Ferrara, Ferrara - Italy
4Naval Research Laboratory, Marine Meteorology Division, Monterey, CA - U.S.A.
5Dept. of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI - U.S.A.
6NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD - U.S.A.
The Mesoscale Alpine Programme (MAP) Special Observing Period (SOP) was held during September-November, 1999. Among its main scientific objectives was the improvement of the understanding of orographically influenced precipitation events involving deep convection and frontal precipitation (Bougeault et al., 2001). A series of 17 Intensive Observation Periods (IOP) were conducted in occasion of frontal passages over the Alps involving cyclogenesis, lifting of stable air over the orography, and heavy precipitation. Ground based, aircraft and satellite observations were available, which make the database unique for studying mountain meteorology.
Rainfall is estimated from satellite using hybrid algorithms based on infrared and microwave data from METEOSAT and the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I), respectively (Turk et al., 1999). Different physical parameterizations are tested to check the algorithms performance on heavy rainfall events over the Alps. At the same time the possibility of using lightning detection as an additional tool to identify convective and stratiform rain is examined (Dietrich et al., 2001). Finally, the Local Analysis and Prediction System (LAPS) (Albers et al., 1996) is used to characterize the events and check the impact of radar and satellite data on mesoscale analysis for assimilation into Limited Area Models (LAM) (Alberoni et al., 2000).
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