Thunderstorm-generated solitary waves - A wind shear hazard

Observations of a boundary-layer solitary wave sensed with the National Severe Storms Laboratory's Doppler weather radar and a 444-m-tall instrumented tower suggest that solitary and other nonlinear waves are a source of significant wind shear hazard to safe flight and thus should be studied both experimentally and theoretically. Wave transport of the horizontal momentum of the vertically sheared ambient air contributed much to the observed wind perturbations and horizontal wind shear. Observations are compared with, and shown to agree fairly closely with, the waveform predicted by steady state, weakly nonlinear, internal wave theory.