Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Tao, Ranting
• Zhao, Kun
• Huang, Hao
• Wen, Long
• Zhang, Guifu
• Zhou, Ang
• Chen, Haonan

Titel

Snow Particle Size Distribution From a 2-D Video Disdrometer and Radar Snowfall Estimation in East China

Ist Teil von

• IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing, 2021-01, Vol.59 (1), p.196-207

Ort / Verlag

New York: IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

• IEEE_Xplore

Quelle

IEEE Electronic Library (IEL)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In this study, as part of an effort to study snowfall characteristics and quantify winter precipitation in East China, we investigated the microphysical properties of snowfall, including size, shape, density, and terminal velocity using a 2-D video disdrometer (2-DVD) and a weighing precipitation gauge in Nanjing (NJ), East China during the winters of 2015-2019. We obtained larger snow density and terminal velocity values than those reported in the literature for this region. Higher snow density could account for higher snowflake terminal velocity, after removing the effects of observation altitude and surface temperature. We then fit the snow particle size distributions (PSDs) to the gamma model and explored the interrelationships among the model parameters and snowfall rate (SR). The relationship between radar reflectivity factor (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">Z_{e} </tex-math></inline-formula>) and SR was derived based on snow PSD measurements and the snow density relation. Using this <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">Z_{e}-\mathrm {SR} </tex-math></inline-formula> relationship, the estimated liquid-equivalent SRs are obtained from S-band NJ radar data collected during several snowfall events. Radar-inferred SRs showed reasonable agreement with those measured on the ground, with a mean absolute error of 16% for the collected snowfall events in NJ.