A friend of min (João Teixeira, many of you may know him) once related the question to me: Imagine that we knew nothing about football (soccer, for the US crowd) and we were tasked with figuring out the rules, but all that we had were snapshots taken from an overpassing drone or satellite, say once per game. Imagine the challenge… well if it were American football it would be worse because with high probability people would conclude it wasn’t a game, rather a costume party… okay the last part was my addition to his story.

So the time dimension is very nice ‽A6 which brings me to today’s entry, which is for Raphaela Vogel, who is on the site, thinking about cold pools (at least I hope so), something she will think about more in Paris where she is going to work with Sandrine in March.

Well this then we can look at using the BCO instrumentation here included as A2. What we see is that at 18:20, coincident with the passage of the convective line, we see the convective line pass it is associate with a sharp change in wind direction, weaker winds (go figure), a small drop in temperature and rise in dew point. And of course a radar signature to the cloud (see also A3). Forty to fifty minutes later we see the generating convective element, or perhaps a new one, emerge over the sight, with precipitation reaching the surface, a sharper reduction in temperature, and this time a wind gust just out ahead of the convection, i.e., the next cold pool. The cloud behind it is a stratiform cloud sheet at about 2.5 km and is quite evident in the radar; it is interesting to see how thin the layer is, and how it even appears more gray in the satellite image (A1). Are these flowers? Well they seem in some ways different, they’re smaller, and seem more like blow off then a stratocumulus layer with their own internal dynamics. ….