Characterizing Maritime Convective Cold Pools in the Philippine Basin during CAMP2Ex

Cold pools are an important component of tropical maritime convection. They tend to suppress convection in and above their interiors, as they are typically colder and drier than their surroundings, but can also enhance convection at their edges by increasing water vapor content and providing a source of lifting for environmental air. The specific properties of cold pools are therefore important for their impacts on convection, however many uncertainties remain about cold pool processes and their subsequent impact on cold pool properties and convective storms. The goal of this work is to characterize tropical maritime cold pool properties in order to understand how and why these properties differ given varying environments and storm systems. As a part of the Cloud, Aerosol and Monsoon Processes Philippines Experiment (CAMP2Ex), 19 research flights were conducted over the Philippine Basin. Dropsondes were dropped inside and just outside of cold pools, providing a dataset of observed cold pools and their surrounding environments. To complement observations from CAMP2Ex, convection-permitting case-study simulations of all 19 research flights days have been run using the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System. This vast modeling dataset provides a wide variety of cold pool cases, from days with minimal cold pool activity, to days with isolated cold pools, to days with multiple clustered cold pools. Cold pools are objectively identified in the simulations. Statistics on critical cold pool properties such as temperature and water vapor mixing ratio are collected, presented, and compared with the dropsonde observations. Comparisons of cold pools between the different research flight days are analyzed to understand how and why cold pools from varying environments and storm systems differ. For example, comparing two different CAMP2Ex flight days, cold pools on 29 September 2019 in a rainband of Tropical Cyclone Onyok were colder than cold pools on 22 September 2019, a day with isolated convection. It appears that greater precipitation rates in the rainband led to greater latent cooling and thus colder cold pools. Cold pool characteristics and processes from the other CAMP2Ex days will be similarly explored.