Identification

Title

Performance of hot plate for measuring solid precipitation in complex terrain during the 2010 Vancouver winter Olympics

Abstract

Solid precipitation intensity, snow density, wind speed, and temperature were collected from November 2009 to February 2010 at a naturally sheltered station located at an altitude of 1640 m MSL on Whistler Mountain in British Colombia, Canada. The snowfall was measured using the instruments OTT Pluvio; the Yankee Environmental Systems, Inc., hot plate (HP); and the Vaisala FD12P (optical weather sensor). The snow amount and density were also measured manually daily. The observed wind speeds were in the range 0-4.5 m s⁻¹ with a mean value of 0.5 m s⁻¹. Based on this study, the HP overestimated the snow amount by about a factor of 2 as compared to the Pluvio measurements. Further data analysis using the raw output HP data suggests that this was because of false precipitations produced, particularly by the downslope flows in the complex terrain when the wind speeds were relatively stronger. This false precipitation varied from −0.9 to 1.3 mm h-1 with two peaks at 0.1 and 0.3 mm h⁻¹ depending on wind speed—the larger peak being at higher wind speeds. Since the observed wind speeds were relatively calm, setting the correction factor to 0.15 mm h⁻¹ gave reasonable values as compared to the Pluvio data. The difference between the corrected HP and Pluvio accumulation data varied from 16% to 3% depending on wind speed. The observed snow density in January 2010 varied from 0.04 to 0.32 g cm⁻³ with a mean value of 0.08 g cm⁻³. The snow amount measured using the corrected HP data agreed well with the manually measured values with a correlation coefficient of 0.93.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7t43v1w

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

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Text

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title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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End position

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date type

publication

effective date

2014-02-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

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Conformity

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Use constraints

Copyright 2014 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

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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

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Metadata point of contact