Extreme rainfall is a high impact weather phenomenon that profoundly affects people around the world, but our fundamental understanding and quantitative forecast skill for these events remains limited.
To address these important scientific and forecast challenges, the U.S National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded Prediction of Rainfall Extremes Campaign In the Pacific (PRECIP) in summer 2022 to improve our understanding of the multi-scale dynamic, thermodynamic, and microphysical processes that produce extreme precipitation.
Observations will be collected by the NSF/NCAR S-PolKa and CSU SEA-POL radars, NCAR MicroPulse DIALs, radiosondes, and disdrometers from 25 May to 10 August during the Meiyu season over Taiwan and transition to the tropical cyclone (TC) season.
The experimental design of PRECIP is motivated by four key factors:
A moisture-rich environment
The presence of both complex terrain and an oceanic environment
A dense operational observing network to augment the specialized field observations
A high frequency of a variety of heavy rainfall events.
Taiwan and the western North Pacific region are a natural laboratory that optimizes all four of these criteria.
With high total column water vapor in the region as a fundamental precondition, field observations will be used to test hypotheses related to the presence and roles of key ingredients and processes across scales in different heavy rainfall scenarios.
PRECIP will be conducted in collaboration with the Taiwan-area Atmospheric and Hydrological Observation and Prediction Experiment (TAHOPE), Japanese Tropical cyclones-Pacific Asian Research Campaign for Improvement of Intensity estimations/forecasts (T-PARCII), and Korea Precipitation Observing Program (KPOP) to add additional synergistic research observations to the campaign.
