Rain Evaporation Rate Estimates from Dual-Wavelength Lidar Measurements and Intercomparison against a Model Analytical Solution
Abstract
Rain evaporation, while significantly contributing to moisture and heat cloud budgets, is a still poorly understood process with few measurements presently available. Multiwavelength lidars, widely employed in aerosols and clouds studies, can also provide useful information on the microphysical characteristics of light precipitation, for example, drizzle and virga. In this paper, lidar measurements of the median volume raindrop diameter and rain evaporation rate profiles are compared with a model analytical solution. The intercomparison reveals good agreement between the model and observations, with a correlation between the profiles up to 65% and a root-mean-square error up to 22% with a 5% bias. Larger discrepancies are due to radiosonde soundings different air masses and model assumptions no more valid along the profile as nonsteady atmosphere and/or appearance of collision–coalescence processes. Nevertheless, this study shares valuable information to better characterize the rain evaporation processes.
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Additional affiliation: Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche, Istituto di Metodologie per l’Analisi Ambientale, Potenza, Italy.
Publisher’s Note: This article was revised on 21 April 2017 to correct the first author’s additional affiliation, and include higher resolution versions of Figs. 2, 5, 6, 8, and 9 that weren’t included when originally published.
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