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A tornado typically has the form of a twisting funnel-shaped cloud between the cloud base and the ground.

"We are interested in this 'droplet activation zone,' where most cloud droplets are initially formed at the cloud base, because the number of droplets formed there will affect the later stages and properties of the cloud -- including how much sunlight a cloud reflects and the likelihood of precipitation," said Brookhaven atmospheric scientist Fan Yang, the first author on the paper.

Atmospheric lidars -- which send laser beams into the atmosphere and measure the signals of light backscattered from molecules, aerosols, and cloud droplets in the atmosphere -- have been widely used to measure the distance to the cloud base.

But traditional lidars can't resolve detailed structures within the cloud base because they typically have a resolution of 10 meters or more.

"We used our unprecedented fine-scale T2 observations of the cloud base region to develop a theoretical model to estimate cloud droplet concentration based on T2-measured backscatter signals," he added.