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<br />3.0 ANALYSIS PROCEDURES <br /> <br />Many meticulous, assiduous and time-consuming manual analyses of <br />severe convective storm case studies (Fujita, 1955, 1963; Fankhauser, <br />1969, 1971, 1974) and many others have shown the importance of mesoscale <br />features. However, these manual analyses are not practicable for <br />real-time analysis and forecasting or the evaluation of large volumes of <br />data due to their high cost. Therefore, a reasonably economical, fast, <br />objective analysis routine and automated data processing techniques were <br />developed to analyze and display important kinematic and thermodynamic <br />characteristics of mechanisms that control natural convective rainfall. <br />This section describes the analysis techniques developed for this <br />study. <br /> <br />3.1 Objective Analysis Method <br /> <br />The objective analysis method developed by Barnes (1973) and <br />modified by Maddox (1980a) was interfaced with the Bureau's Skywater EDN <br />to provide real-time analysis of all NWS and Skywater rawinsondes. <br />Barnes used a Gaussian weight function to provide an objective analysis <br />of meteorological fields. The method is used here to provide a basic <br />analysis tool for scale separation. The method first uses a low-pass <br />filter which smoothes the observation data field with a known response <br />to define a macroscale field. Then a band-pass filter extracts the <br />mesoscale signal using a modification (Maddox, 1980a) of the analysis <br />technique developed by Doswell (1977) Finally, an objective analysis of <br />39 <br />