Some of the most damaging surface winds experienced in midlatitude cyclonic storms have been attributed to a phenomenon known as a sting jet. Previous studies have deduced how sting jets develop from their midtropospheric origin, but there have been no direct observations of these wind features in the midtroposphere. During Windstorm Jeanette on 27 October 2002, the tip of the storm's cloud head passed over a VHF wind profiler at Aberystwyth, Wales, allowing the structure of a sting jet to be measured with high spatial and temporal resolution. These observations showed a multiple slantwise structure to the sting jet region, with two tails of increased winds that persisted after the passing of the cloud head aloft. Simulations by the Met Office Unified Model (UM) showed that the slantwise structure followed θ w surfaces, and that the sting jet descended along θ surfaces as it passed over the UK, accelerating and drying during its descent. The horizontal and vertical scales of the observed structures are compatible with slantwise convection releasing conditional symmetric instability within the cloud head. Further observations of the sting jet were obtained by a UHF wind profiler at Cardington in Eastern England, where the sting jet had merged with the cold conveyor belt circulating around the storm. An unstable temperature profile in the lowest kilometre over Cardington enabled damaging gusts of strong winds to be brought to the surface in convective plumes; however, this strong vertical mixing was not represented correctly in the UM.
Continuous sounding of the troposphere by the NERC Mesosphere-Stratosphere-Troposphere (MST) wind profiling radar, mid-Wales, since late 1997 provides a unique dataset with which to study the mesoscale wind field of the mid-troposphere over the United Kingdom. A wind speed probability density function (PDF) generated from 7 years of data is used to design a feature-finding algorithm to identify mesoscale strong wind events in the radar dataset. The resulting 117 events form a climatology of mesoscale strong wind features at mid-tropospheric heights over the British Isles, defined as peak wind speeds at or above the top 1% of the PDF, wind speeds exceeding the top 5% for at least 1 h, and extending over at least 1 km in depth. Plotting the location of the peak winds of these features on schematic charts of the Norwegian and Shapiro-Keyser models of cyclogenesis show these to be mainly warm sector and cold frontal in nature, with smaller numbers of tropopause folds and sting jets. Wind roses indicate a prevailing westerly direction for mid-tropospheric winds generally, but the strong wind events are distinctly different: cold frontal and warm sector events prevail from the south to southwest, tropopause folds from the northwest and sting jets from the west. The wider applicability of the results to the British Isles is established through comparison with radiosonde data from five sites covering the British Isles.
ABSTRACT:There is increasing interest in the development of aircraft operating procedures that reduce the environmental impacts of commercial aviation through minimization of fuel burn, emissions and noise impacts. Meteorological factors can have a major influence on the behaviour of aircraft in different phases of flight, thus they must be carefully considered in the development of any new procedures. In this paper the most important of these factors are considered (wind profiles and local pressure variations) within the context of development of advanced approach procedures at a major UK airport. Models of the wind characteristics were developed for the region around the airport using data collected from the Natural Environment Research Council Mesosphere-Stratosphere-Troposphere Radar at Aberystwyth and surface wind measurements made at the airport, while an analysis of local pressure effects was based on readings taken at the airport. These models were used in a Monte Carlo flight simulator to determine the suitability of different approach procedure designs in terms of flight and environmental performance. Flight tests of the final procedure design were conducted at the airport with a variety of commercial aircraft. These demonstrated the suitability of the procedures (and hence validated the modelling strategies used) and that significant environmental benefits in terms of reduced noise, fuel burn and emissions were achieved compared to existing procedures.
ISO19156 Observations and Measurements (O&M) provides a standardised framework for organising information about the collection of information about the environment. Here we describe the implementation of a specialisation of O&M for environmental data, the Metadata Objects for Linking Environmental Sciences (MOLES3).MOLES3 provides support for organising information about data, and for user navigation around data holdings. The implementation described here, “CEDA-MOLES”, also supports data management functions for the Centre for Environmental Data Archival, CEDA. The previous iteration of MOLES (MOLES2) saw active use over five years, being replaced by CEDA-MOLES in late 2014. During that period important lessons were learnt both about the information needed, as well as how to design and maintain the necessary information systems. In this paper we review the problems encountered in MOLES2; how and why CEDA-MOLES was developed and engineered; the migration of information holdings from MOLES2 to CEDA-MOLES; and, finally, provide an early assessment of MOLES3 (as implemented in CEDA-MOLES) and its limitations.Key drivers for the MOLES3 development included the necessity for improved data provenance, for further structured information to support ISO19115 discovery metadata export (for EU INSPIRE compliance), and to provide appropriate fixed landing pages for Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) in the presence of evolving datasets. Key lessons learned included the importance of minimising information structure in free text fields, and the necessity to support as much agility in the information infrastructure as possible without compromising on maintainability both by those using the systems internally and externally (e.g. citing in to the information infrastructure), and those responsible for the systems themselves. The migration itself needed to ensure continuity of service and traceability of archived assets.
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