Cold pools in the Columbia Basin

Abstract

Persistent midwinter cold air pools produce multiday periods of cold, dreary weather in basins and valleys. Persistent stable stratification leads to the buildup of pollutants and moisture in the pool. Because the pool sometimes has temperatures below freezing while the air above is warmer, freezing precipitation often occurs, with consequent effects on transportation and safety. Forecasting the buildup and breakdown of these cold pools is difficult because the interacting physical mechanisms leading to their formation, maintenance, and destruction have received little study. In this paper, persistent wintertime cold pools in the Columbia River basin of eastern Washington are studied. First a succinct meteorological definition of a cold pool is provided and then a 10-yr database is used to develop a cold pool climatology. This is followed by a detailed examination of two cold pool episodes that were accompanied by fog and stratus using remote and in situ temperature and wind sounding data. The two episodes illustrate many of the physical mechanisms that affect cold pool evolution. In one case, the cold pool was formed by warm air advection above the basin and was destroyed by downslope winds that descended into the southern edge of the basin and progressively displaced the cold air in the basin. In the second case, the cold pool began with a basin temperature inversion on a clear night and strengthened when warm air was advected above the basin by a westerly flow that descended from the Cascade Mountains. The cold pool was nearly destroyed one afternoon by cold air advection aloft and by the growth of a convective boundary layer (CBL) following the partial breakup of the basin stratus. The cold pool restrengthened, however, with nightime cooling and was destroyed the next afternoon by a growing CBL.