Abstract

The Joint Airport Weather Studies (JAWS) Project conducted a field investigation during the summer of 1982 in and around Denver, Colorado. The principal objective of JAWS was to study convectively driven downdrafts and resulting outflows near the earth's surface. In general, information on wind fields was collected in several ways, including the use of Doppler radars, instrumented aircraft and rawinsondes. In particular, JAWS was marked by the participation of two ground-based CO₂, 10.6 µm Doppler lidars, one operated by NASA/Marshall and the other by NOAA/WPL. Observations of surface winds (as well as other parameters) in the area of the lidars were made routinely using 27 Portable Automated Mesonet (PAM) stations operated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Figure 1 shows the location of the lidars, PAM stations and Doppler radars (CP–2, CP–3 and CP–4, operated by NCAR).

© 1983 Optical Society of America