All righty, now let’s take a look at a maturing QLCS mesovortex, starting with AzShear…

At the apex of the bow we see a bit of an AzShear couplet (maximum at the apex with a weaker “blue” minimum just to the south). Comparing this to DivShear…

Hmm, certainly some blue negative divergence (i.e., convergence) there too. Now putting them together into Velocity Gradient…

…things really really start to pop. At this point, it appears that the azimuthal shear is a bit more of a contributor than DivShear. Now looking later when the mesovortex is shifting away from the apex, starting with AzShear, we see a much less focused area…

However, DivShear has really taken up the slack here with a strong convergence signature…

Finally, again putting it all together, we see a very clear signal in the Velocity Gradient showing the best superposition of cyclonic shear and convergence (white area). This is absolutely huge for diagnosing mesovortex evolution since we often see a shifting balance between convergence and azimuthal shear and we can use something like Velocity Potential to get it all at once.

I really appreciate the efforts of Thea and others here who made this dataset available on such short notice. They also showed some examples of these products with tornadic supercells that blew my mind.

#MarfaFront