Layers of enhanced spectrum width within Northeast United States coastal winter storms

This dataset was produced in support of Leghart et al. 2025 (in review,
Monthly Weather Review), which investigates shear and turbulence within
winter storms by identifying and characterizing spectrum width layers
(SWLs)—coherent horizontal features associated with turbulent or
shear-driven processes in the cloud. This dataset contains Ka-band radar
observations collected by the Ka-Band Scanning Polarimetric Radar (KASPR),
located at Stony Brook University (40.899°N, 73.127°W) on Long Island, NY,
during cool-season precipitation events between 2017 and 2021. KASPR is a
dual-polarization, Doppler radar designed to observe fine-scale cloud and
precipitation structures with high spatial and temporal resolution.
Technical details and performance characteristics of the radar are
described in Kumjian et al. (2020, J. Appl. Meteor. Climatol.,
https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-20-0054.1) and Kollias et al. (2020,
Geophys. Res. Lett., https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL088440). KASPR was one
of the ground-based radars participating in the NASA Investigation of
Microphysics and Precipitation of Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms
(IMPACTS) field experiment (McMurdie et al. 2022,
https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-20-0246.1). Each KASPR_XXX_SWL_moments file
(XXX is PPI or VPT) corresponds to a single radar scan. Only radar moments
used for SWL detection are included in these files: range, elevation,
altitude, spectrum width (SW), reflectivity, and supporting metadata.
KASPR SWL files are in NetCDF (.nc) format. The .nc files are stored by
winter season (Dec - March) within .zip files. These data provide a
high-resolution record of sub-kilometer-scale dynamical features in
coastal winter storms and are intended to support further research on
turbulent processes and microphysical variability in stratiform cloud
systems. A convolution-based algorithm is applied to the SW field to
return a climatology of SWLs within the PPI scans and VPT
profiles. The XXX_SWL_Climatology.csv (XXX is PPI or VPT) files
contain the SWL datasets which are generated using matlab code found
at https://github.com/erinleghart/SWL_Detection.