Identification

Title

Toward improving ice water content and snow-rate retrievals from radars. Part II: Results from three wavelength radar-collocated in situ measurements and CloudSat-GPM-TRMM radar data

Abstract

Two methods for deriving relationships between the equivalent radar reflectivity factor Z(e) and the snowfall rate S at three radar wavelengths are described. The first method uses collocations of in situ aircraft (microphysical observations) and overflying aircraft (radar observations) from two field programs to develop Z(e)-S relationships. In the second method, measurements of Z(e) at the top of the melting layer (ML), from radars on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM), and CloudSat satellites, are related to the retrieved rainfall rate R at the base of the ML, assuming that the mass flux through the ML is constant. Retrievals of R are likely to be more reliable than S because far fewer assumptions are involved in the retrieval and because supporting ground-based validation data are available. The Z(e)-S relationships developed here for the collocations and the mass-flux technique are compared with those derived from level 2 retrievals from the standard satellite products and with a number of relationships developed and reported by others. It is shown that there are substantial differences among them. The relationships developed here promise improvements in snowfall-rate retrievals from satellite-based radar measurements.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7qc066m

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2018-02-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact