Identification

Title

Importance of snow to global precipitation

Abstract

Precipitation controls the availability of drinking water and viability of the land to support agriculture. Failure to accurately predict the location, magnitude, and frequency of precipitation impacts not only numerical weather forecasting but also climate modeling. It has been proposed that most rainfall events originate from ice that has melted to form rain. Here we use remote sensing from spaceborne cloud radar to quantify that idea. A new metric is constructed to quantify the fraction of rain events at the surface that are linked to snow melting at a higher altitude. CloudSat is used to show the global variation of the importance of snow in the precipitation process. In the tropics, subtropics, midlatitude and polar regions 0.3, 0.4, 0.8, and >0.9, respectively, of all precipitation events (>1 mm/d) are linked to the production of snow in clouds.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7hq41db

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

2015-11-16T00:00:00Z

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