Water transport by thin moist layers in Project STORM soundings

A previous examination of water vapor layers in Project STORM-FEST is exten ded to include Project STORM-WAVE rawinsonde observations and assess the co ntribution of layers in these two datasets to atmospheric water transport. The observations indicate that the contribution of these layers to water tr ansport climatology is only a few percent. However the analysis also shows that episodes occur fairly frequently where these layers contribute 20% or more of the horizontal transport. Instances when the layer's moisture is an important part of the water transport tend to occur for relatively dry sou ndings. Numerical models that fail to resolve the layers during these episo des may thus miss condensation events leading to cloud formation and precip itation, and also give overly smooth vertical profiles of radiative heating and cooling. The layers thus appear to be important for numerical weather prediction.