After seeing lots of what appears to be virga in these cases, I’d like to know a little more about the thermodynamic environment. In particular I’d really like RH data, especially since is will also be useful to diagnose deliquescence and analyze hygroscopic aerosols. I considered using reanalysis data, but the spatial resolution will be too low.

Luckily, there is an airport only 42 km away that does 4 radiosondes per day. That might not be enough data, so I’ll try to get AMDAR data, but let’s see what it looks like anyway.

Osan

The data I found https://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/igra/data/data-y2d/KSM00047122-data-beg2016.txt.zip looks like this in the database:

station_id time pressure gph rh dpdp wdir wspd
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 73       280 24.7
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 70 18440   28 290 24.7
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 70       295 24.7
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 62       300 14.9
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 62     28    
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 60       285 14.4
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 58     28    
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 55       320 14.9
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 54       310 12.3
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 53       275 10.3
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 52       295 12.3
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 50 20490   27 295 16.5
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 50     27    
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 49       300 20.1
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 47     28    
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 46       305 12.3
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 45       285 14.9
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 43       295 12.3
KSM00047122 2017-02-22 00:07:39 42       265 11.3

Now, I have HSRL data in altitude coordinates so I just used geopotential height as the vertical coordinate. The rh is always missing, so I used dew point depression (degC) instead. As you can see there is lots of missing data, so I need to interpolate vertically. I also can only have 5 points per day. Anyway it looks like this…

RGB DPDP

There is a big blob of dry air below the clouds, and there is an aerosol layer in what looks like a moisture gradient. The clouds are of course moist, which is reassuring.

RGB DPDP 2

In the very center you can see that the aerosol get more orange in the region of enhanced humidity. Evidence of deliquescence?

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