9 December 2011, by Tom Marshall
Scientists have sprung into action to probe the violent storm that battered Scotland yesterday.
They used a dedicated research aircraft to measure the atmosphere around the storm and even to drop specially-designed instrument packages into its heart.
The data they collected will help improve weather forecasts and climate models by giving scientists an unprecedented insight into what goes in the turbulent depths of the storms they call 'sting jets'.
It includes measurements of wind speed, temperature, humidity, cloud particles in the eye of the storm. The scientists also dropped instruments from the aircraft into the storm to measure its 'profile' - how these properties vary as you move vertically through it. All this data was transmitted to the aircraft's base in Exeter to be used in forecasting how the storm would develop.
'This storm was of a type known as a "sting jet" – the cloud band observed by satellites resembles a scorpion's tail, with the highest winds at the tip.'
'Our study of today's storm will be a major opportunity to improve forecasts of violent wind events,' says Professor Geraint Vaughan of the University of Manchester, an atmospheric scientist who stayed on the ground monitoring the data being collected by the researchers on the aeroplane. 'This storm was of a type known as a "sting jet", named because the cloud band observed by satellites resembles a scorpion's tail, with the highest winds at the tip.'
'This case gives us excellent data to take forward the research we have been doing at Manchester into the dynamics of these storms,' he adds. Meteorologists can these days predict major storms much more accurately than they once could, but within these storms are smaller areas of particularly vicious weather that are much trickier to forecast, particularly more than a day or so ahead. It's vital we learn to do this though, as much of the storm's damage is concentrated in these pockets of severe weather.
View from the FAAM aircraft.
The BAe-146 atmospheric research aircraft is operated by the Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements, which is a collaboration between the Met Office and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
The research flight was part of the DIAMET project, a NERC-funded consortium between the universities of East Anglia, Leeds, Manchester and Reading and NERC research centres the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) and the National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO), with the Met Office also heavily involved as partners. It aims to find ways to improve our ability to forecast this kind of rare, high-impact weather ahead of time.
The aircraft took off on Thursday morning from Exeter, flew north to Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides, spent time sampling the storm's south-western reaches, to the west of Scotland, before landing in Teesside to refuel and then measuring the storm over eastern Scotland.
