Derivation of the multi-Doppler 3D wind field during the 2023 WesCon-WOEST campaign in southern England

Abstract. Convection drives high-impact weather events but remains challenging to represent accurately in modern convection-resolving weather prediction models. Robust evaluation and development of these models therefore require detailed observations of convective dynamics, with enough data for statistical application. In this study we present the first multi-Doppler radar 3D wind analysis in the UK. Five radars used in the WesCON-WOEST field campaign are used with an updated version of the PyDDA algorithm. This includes a newly implemented "ORIGAMI" unfolding algorithm based on model winds, a combined VAD initialisation and a cloud-top boundary condition. The resulting dataset provides a complete 3D wind grid with 1 km horizontal and 500 m vertical resolution every 10 minutes over the 3 month field campaign. Validation against two radar wind profilers show the horizontal wind components have RMSE better than 2.4 ms−1, with a small bias in the westerly component, u. Statistical comparison to aircraft flight data shows similar distribution, but underestimates the strongest up- and downdrafts, as a result of not resolving the scale of the smallest updrafts. This data provides important dynamical information on convective processes and offers a valuable resource for evaluating and improving convection-resolving models.