A NASA Field Campaign Design to Investigate Remote Sensing Applications for Severe Storms

Improving our understanding of clouds and convection at a process level and their representation in everything from nowcasting to large-scale models is amongst the most important issues in atmospheric science today. Two separate teams were funded to perform preliminary design studies for a future field campaign by a NASA Severe Storms Research proposal call in 2015. These teams marked the first time that ground-based mobile radar scientists, satellite remote sensing experts, and modelers were brought together in the same location to address the big question: How can we improve detection of tornadoes from space? Both team convened two separate sessions each over the 2015-2016 timeframe with many attendees from government laboratories, universities, and other experts from the severe storms field. Each team wrote separate white papers to summarize findings from their meetings and now both teams have combined to write one white paper. As a result, the primary purpose of the Tornado Warning Improvement including Satellite-enhanced Tools (TWIST) field campaign design is to understand if tornadogenesis is related, if at all, to features that can be detected with spaceborne remote sensors. This talk will focus on the path forward for the science with renewed focus from the 2017 Decadal Survey, which re-emphasized the importance of understanding dynamics within severe storms and applications for societal impacts.