Convective and Orographically-induced Precipitation Study (COPS): Airborne and Ground-Based Atmospheric Measurements

The Convective and Orographically-induced Precipitation Study (COPS) was an international field campaign initiated by the German Research Foundation (DFG). This dataset collection contains vertical wind profiler measurements. The UK component of the campaign involved flights by the FAAM aircraft and the deployment of a number of the UK Universities' Facility for Atmospheric Measurement (UFAM) mobile instruments in summer 2007. These included a Doppler Lidar, a radiometer, a wind profiler, two sodars, an aerosol monitoring suite, a network of automatic weather stations and two radiosonde stations. The objective was to identify the physical and chemical processes responsible for the deficiencies in quantitative precipitation forecasting (QPF) over low-mountain regions with the goal of improving their model representation, and thus improve forecasts. For the field experiment, a region in southwestern Germany/eastern France was selected where severe thunderstorm activity is frequent in summer with significant amounts of precipitation and risk of flash flood events, while the skill of numerical weather forecasts in the region is particularly low. This dataset includes measurements of wind speeds and wind directions and aerosol concentrations.