PICCOLO

Process Investigation of Clouds and Convective Organization over the atLantic Ocean

Lead PI: Allison Wing (Florida State University), James Ruppert (University of Oklahoma), Michael Bell (Colorado State University), and Morgan O’Neill (University of Toronto)

PICCOLO plans to deploy the SEA-POL radar on the Meteor to investigate the nature, governing mechanisms, and impact of mesoscale organization of precipitating deep convection in the context of the Atlantic ITCZ.

The objectives of PICCOLO involve (1) precipitation, humidity, and organization; (2) microphysical characteristics; (3) importance of radiative processes; and (4) the entropy budget.

SEA-POL is the Colorado State University Sea-Going Polarimetric Radar, a National Science Foundation (NSF) community facility. SEA-POL is a 5.65 GHz ship-stabilized Doppler radar that operates at C-band to measure dual-polarization.

PICCOLO is funded by the US National Science Foundation.