IR Imaging of surface winds in supercells?

[Patrick JH]

Hi there. Please don't flame me.

I was just wondering if anyone has used IR cameras for studying surface winds in supercell thunderstorms. There is a company in Norway (http://nicarnicaaviation.com/) that makes IR cameras for studying non-visible ash clouds surrounding volcanoes. I contacted them and they did say they could possibly be tweaked for detecting dust (or other particulate) picked up by surface winds, even if it's not visible to the naked eye. I wonder if there would be a different profile for cells that produce tornadoes versus ones that don't.

I don't know. I'm not a scientist (obviously). I also don't have $100k to drop on a camera based on an uneducated guess. I like to be somewhat realistic. It's just something that came to mind after seeing some footage:

Watch video >

Have at it!

 

[Jeff Duda]

To my knowledge, no, no one has done this for supercells. Given this is a remote sensing application, I'm not sure such a project would bear much fruit since the components of thunderstorms (mostly liquid water) don't emit strongly at IR frequencies. I'm pretty sure that's a big reason we use microwave/millimeter radar to study precipitating weather systems and airflow within supercells. While an IR camera could detect dust particles too small to be sampled by common weather radar, I think the presence of so many water particles would render the necessity of following dust particles useless.

Good idea, though.