A unique meteorological field experiment (COHMEX) was conducted from March-July 1986 with a core period of operation in June and July. It took place in the region covering northern Alabama and the adjoining portion of central Tennessee. The experiment was actually composed of three distinct experiments sponsored by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) with extensive sharing of resources and data.

From Coperative Huntsville Meteorological Experiment (COHMEX)

CIMSS participation in COHMEX spanned three years, 1985-1988. First year effort included real-time support and satellite data collection during the field phase of COHMEX. Real-time products were generated by CIMSS and made available to the COHMEX operations center via the on-site McIDAS. Work efforts following the filed phase of COHMEX concentrated on post-processing of the real-time data sets and generation of enhanced, research-quality satellite data sets for selected COHMEX core days.

The NASA component, SPACE (Satellite Precipitation and Cloud Experiment), focused during the prestorm period upon observations of the physical processes leading to the formation of small convective systems. The NSF component, MIST (Microburst and Severe Thunderstorms), investigated the three-dimensional structure of the microbursts from thunderstorms and their environment in a wet region of the United States. The FAA experiment, FLOWS (FAA-Lincoln Laboratories Operational Weather Studies), developed and tested automatic algorithms for wind shear (in particular microburst and gust front) detection by using pulse Doppler radar data.

From Cooperative Huntsville Meteorological Experiment by James Dodge. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, v. 67, no. 4, pp. 417-419