Session RP1 - Poster Session VIII.
POSTER session, Thursday afternoon, October 30
Fran Hill Southeast Exhibit Hall, ACC
The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has recently developed a high power 94 GHz radar called WARLOC. This radar has unique advantages for cloud research stemming from the fact that the return from clouds scales inversely as the fourth power of the wavelength. Clouds are largely invisible to conventional radars and opaque to lidars, whereas millimeter-wave radars produce strong signals from cloud water droplets. Thus W-Band radars can be used to sense the internal structure of clouds. The WARLOC transmitter has about three orders-of-magnitude more average power than the W-Band radars used in previous cloud studies and greatly improved resolution and scanning capability. Here we report initial results on cloud studies. The new capabilities of WARLOC have allowed us to produce high-resolution images of the internal structure of clouds. Regions many square kilometers in area can be scanned with 15 m resolution in about a minute even through intervening cloud layers. The scanned cloud reflectivity yields two-dimensional cloud turbulence correlation functions and power spectra directly from spatial measurements for the first time, and with higher resolution than previously possible. We find that in the inertial range, the Kolmogorov spectral index (-5/3) agrees reasonably well with the data, but the assumption of isotropy does not. Interestingly, in two clouds studied, at longer scale lengths, the fluctuations appear to be wavelike in the vertical direction, but not in the horizontal direction.