Composites of Anomalies

I believe there were some issues inherent to the way I was previously defining two day events in the IWVF field. For example, in a situation where there were four days straight above 90th percentile, then my code would have registered 3 events. To combat this flaw I went through and defined a two day event as:

2 consecutive days above 90th percentile
for a zone where event day - 1 must not meet criteria

This appears to have helped out very well, and thus, I will show new and improved (and shiny, I might add) results.

Note: Since MATLAB disagrees with you about how large certain subplots should be when you start adding in colorbars, I will simply state data ranges here:

DWP Anomalies: -2:5
IWV Anomalies: -3:8
Precip Anomalies: 0:5

These restrictions are based on observed values in the data and which value range best described the data.

(1) Event for SAZ Zone
The figure includes IWVF and anomalies of Dewpoint, Precipitable Water and Precipitation. Anomalies also helped to weed-out patterns present in these fields that were not easily decernded from the basic field values. We clear see a northward flux of dewpoint, precipitable water and precipitation in relation to IWVF events. Precipitable water shows the most concurrent signature with IWVF, which should be expected as these fields are based on similar data. We can now see the slightly delayed, by one or two days, flux of precipitation and dewpoint into the AZ, NM and UT domains. As described more fully in a previous post, this is a feature we expect to see. So, things are looking good.

(2) Event for SAZ and NAZ Zones

Features are similar in this figure as with (1) except that we are seeing a stronger signal in all fields compared to (1). This should be expected since we are further refining our events to cases where IWVF moved more northward, thus a strong flux.

(3) All Zones (1 Day Criteria)

So, the final figure is for an event that shows up in all three zones on a given day. This event is not restricted to 2 consecutive days criteria as with above examples. Most of the signatures appear before event day for this criteria. What we are pretty much looking at in this 'event day' is the height of activity, i.e., furthest northward flux. If we were defining events of 2 consecutive days for SAZ and NAZ then it would probably show up on Day-1 here. Again, signals are very amplified here, as we should expect.

Well, I am pretty to call events defined. So, Events = Defined:

Weak Event = 2 consecutive days of IWVF at or above 90th percentile for SAZ
Moderate Event = 2 consecutive days of IWVF at or above 90th percentile for SAZ and NAZ
Strong Event = 1 day of IWVF at or above 90th percentile for SAZ, NAZ and SUT

-jamie