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Féral & Sauvageot 2002
Féral, L. and Sauvageot, H. (2002). Fractal identification of supercell storms. Geophysical Research Letters 29: doi: 10.1029/2002GL015260. issn: 0094-8276.

The most intense and violent form of convective storm is the supercell storm, usually associated with heavy rain, hail, and destructive gusty winds, downbursts, and tornadoes. Identifying a storm cell as a supercell storm is not easy. What is shown here, from radar data, is that when an ordinary, or multicell storm evolves towards the supercellular organization, its fractal dimension is modified. Whereas the fractal dimension of the ordinary convective storms, including multicell thunderstorms, is observed around 1.35, in agreement with previous results, the fractal dimension of supercell storms is found close to 1.07. This low value is due to the unicellular character of supercells. The present paper suggests that the fractal dimension is a parameter that should be considered to analyse the dynamical organization of a convective field and to detect and identify the supercell storms, either isolated or among a population of convective storms.

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Abstract

Keywords
Meteorology and Atmospheric Dynamics, Convective processes, Meteorology and Atmospheric Dynamics, Precipitation, Meteorology and Atmospheric Dynamics, Remote sensing, Radio Science, Radar atmospheric physics
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/
Publisher
American Geophysical Union
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