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Stefan Kneifel
and
Dmitri Moisseev

Abstract

Riming is an efficient process of converting liquid cloud water into ice and plays an important role in the formation of precipitation in cold clouds. Due to the rapid increase in ice particle mass, riming enhances the particle’s terminal velocity, which can be detected by ground-based vertically pointing cloud radars if the effect of vertical air motions can be sufficiently mitigated. In our study, we first revisit a previously published approach to relate the radar mean Doppler velocity (MDV) to rime mass fraction (FR) using a large ground-based in situ dataset. This relation is then applied to multiyear datasets of cloud radar observations collected at four European sites covering polluted central European, clean maritime, and Arctic climatic conditions. We find that riming occurs in 1%–8% of the nonconvective ice containing clouds with median FR between 0.5 and 0.6. Both the frequency of riming and FR reveal relatively small variations for different seasons. In contrast to previous studies, which suggested enhanced riming for clean environments, our statistics indicate the opposite; however, the differences between the locations are overall small. We find a very strong relation between the frequency of riming and temperature. While riming is rare at temperatures lower than −12°C, it strongly increases toward 0°C. Previous studies found a very similar temperature dependence for the amount and droplet size of supercooled liquid water, which might be closely connected to the riming signature found in this study. In contrast to riming frequency, we find almost no temperature dependence for FR.

Open access
Dmitri N. Moisseev
and
V. Chandrasekar

Abstract

Raindrop size distributions are often assumed to follow a three-parameter gamma distribution. Since rain intensity retrieval from radar observations is an underdetermined problem, there is great interest in finding physical correlations between the parameters of the gamma distribution. One of the more common approaches is to measure naturally occurring drop size distributions (DSDs) using a disdrometer and to find DSD parameters by fitting a gamma distribution to these observations. Often the method of moments is used to retrieve the parameters of a gamma distribution from disdrometer observations.

In this work the effect of the method of moments and data filtering on the relation between the parameters of the DSD is investigated, namely, the shape μ and the slope Λ parameters. For this study the disdrometer observations were simulated. In these simulations the gamma distribution parameters Nw , D 0, and μ were randomly selected from a wide range of values that are found in rainfall. Then, using simulated disdrometer measurements, DSD parameters were estimated using the method of moments. It is shown that the statistical errors associated with data filtering of disdrometer measurements might produce a spurious relation between μ and Λ parameters. It is also shown that three independent disdrometer measurements can be used to verify the existence of such a relation.

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Dmitri N. Moisseev
and
V. Chandrasekar

Abstract

This paper presents a method to retrieve raindrop size distributions (DSD) from slant profile dual-polarization Doppler spectra observations. It is shown that using radar measurements taken at a high elevation angle raindrop size distributions can be retrieved without making an assumption on the form of a DSD. In this paper it is shown that drop size distributions can be retrieved from Doppler power spectra by compensating for the effect of spectrum broadening and mean velocity shift. To accomplish that, spectrum deconvolution is used where the spectral broadening kernel width and wind velocity are estimated from spectral differential reflectivity measurements. Since convolution kernel is estimated from dual-polarization Doppler spectra observations and does not require observation of a clear-air signal, this method can be used by most radars capable of dual-polarization spectra measurements.

To validate the technique, sensitivity of this method to the underlying assumptions and calibration errors is evaluated on realistic simulations of radar observations. Furthermore, performance of the method is illustrated on Colorado State University–University of Chicago–Illinois State Water Survey radar (CSU–CHILL) measurements of stratiform precipitation.

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Dmitri N. Moisseev
and
V. Chandrasekar

Abstract

In this paper, spectral decompositions of differential reflectivity, differential phase, and copolar correlation coefficient are used to discriminate between weather and nonweather signals in the spectral domain. This approach gives a greater flexibility for discrimination between different types of scattering sources present in a radar observation volume. A spectral filter, which removes nonweather signals, is defined based on this method. The performance of this filter is demonstrated on the Colorado State University–University of Chicago–Illinois State Water Survey (CSU–CHILL) observations. It is shown that the resulting filter parameters are adaptively defined for each range sample and do not require an assumption on spectral properties of ground clutter.

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Tuomo Lauri
,
Jarmo Koistinen
, and
Dmitri Moisseev

Abstract

When making radar-based precipitation products, a radar measurement is commonly taken to represent the geographical location vertically below the contributing volume of the measurement sample. However, when wind is present during the fall of the hydrometeors, precipitation will be displaced horizontally from the geographical location of the radar measurement. Horizontal advection will introduce discrepancies between the radar-measured and ground level precipitation fields. The significance of the adjustment depends on a variety of factors related to the characteristics of the observed precipitation as well as those of the desired end product. In this paper the authors present an advection adjustment scheme for radar precipitation observations using estimated hydrometeor trajectories obtained from the High-Resolution Limited-Area Model (HIRLAM) MB71 NWP model data. They use the method to correct the operational Finnish radar composite and evaluate the significance of precipitation advection in typical Finnish conditions. The results show that advection distances on the order of tens of kilometers are consistently observed near the edge of the composite at ranges of 100–250 km from the nearest radar, even when using a low elevation angle of 0.3°. The Finnish wind climatology suggests that approximately 15% of single radar measurement areas are lost on average when estimating ground level rainfall if no advection adjustment is applied. For the Finnish composite, area reductions of approximately 10% have been observed, while the measuring area is extended downstream by a similar amount. Advection becomes increasingly important at all ranges in snowfall with maximum distances exceeding 100 km.

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Jani Tyynelä
,
Jussi Leinonen
,
Dmitri Moisseev
, and
Timo Nousiainen

Abstract

The sensitivity of radar backscattering cross sections on different snowflake shapes is studied at C, Ku, Ka, and W bands. Snowflakes are simulated using two complex shape models, namely, fractal and aggregate, and a soft spheroid model. The models are tuned to emulate physical properties of real snowflakes, that is, the mass–size relation and aspect ratio. It is found that for particle sizes up to 5 mm and for frequencies from 5 to 35 GHz, there is a good agreement in the backscattering cross section for all models. For larger snowflakes at the Ka band, it is found that the spheroid model underestimates the backscattering cross sections by a factor of 10, and at W band by a factor of 50–100. Furthermore, there is a noticeable difference between spheroid and complex shape models in the linear depolarization ratios for all frequencies and particle sizes.

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Cuong M. Nguyen
,
Dmitri N. Moisseev
, and
V. Chandrasekar

Abstract

A parametric time domain method (PTDM) for clutter mitigation and precipitation spectral moments’ estimation for weather radars is introduced. Use of PTDM allows for the simultaneous estimation of clutter and precipitation echo spectral moments. It is shown that this approach leads to accurate estimates of precipitation spectral moments in the presence of clutter. Based on simulations, the PTDM performance is evaluated and compared against the clutter spectral filtering technique. In this study special attention is paid to the cases of strong clutter contamination. Furthermore, both methods, the PTDM and spectral clutter filter, are illustrated using the Colorado State University–University of Chicago–Illinois State Water Survey (CSU–CHILL) observations.

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Pekka J. Rossi
,
V. Chandrasekar
,
Vesa Hasu
, and
Dmitri Moisseev

Abstract

The weather radar–based object-oriented convective storm tracking is a standard approach for analyzing and nowcasting convective storms. However, the majority of current storm-tracking algorithms provide nowcasts only in a deterministic fashion with limited ability to estimate the related uncertainties.

This paper proposes a method for probabilistic nowcasting of convective storms that addresses the issue of uncertainty of nowcasts. The approach first utilizes a two-dimensional radar-based storm identification and tracking algorithm in conjunction with the Kalman filtering of noisy measurements of storm centroid with the continuous white noise acceleration model. The resulting smoothed estimates of storm centroid and velocity components and their error covariance values are then applied to nowcast the probability of storm occurrence.

To verify the approach, 20–60-min nowcasts were computed every 5 min using composite weather radar data in Finland including approximately 22 000 tracked storms. The verification shows that the algorithm is applicable in both deterministic and probabilistic manner. Moreover, the forecast probabilities are consistent with observed frequencies of the storms, especially with 20- and 30-min nowcasts. The accuracy of the probabilistic nowcasts was evaluated through the Brier skill score with respect to the deterministic nowcasts and nowcasts based on observation persistence and sample climatology. The results show that the proposed nowcasting method has an improved accuracy over all of the reference forecast types.

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Jussi Leinonen
,
Dmitri Moisseev
,
Matti Leskinen
, and
Walter A. Petersen

Abstract

To improve the understanding of high-latitude rain microphysics and its implications for the remote sensing of rainfall by ground-based and spaceborne radars, raindrop size measurements have been analyzed that were collected over five years with a Joss–Waldvogel disdrometer located in Järvenpää, Finland. The analysis shows that the regional climate is characterized by light rain and small drop size with narrow size distributions and that the mutual relations of drop size distribution parameters differ from those reported at lower latitudes. Radar parameters computed from the distributions demonstrate that the high latitudes are a challenging target for weather radar observations, particularly those employing polarimetric and dual-frequency techniques. Nevertheless, the findings imply that polarimetric ground radars can produce reliable “ground truth” estimates for space observations and identify dual-frequency radars utilizing a W-band channel as promising tools for observing rainfall in the high-latitude climate.

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Dmitri N. Moisseev
,
Cuong M. Nguyen
, and
V. Chandrasekar

Abstract

This paper presents a clutter suppression methodology for staggered pulse repetition time (PRT) observations. It is shown that spectral moments of precipitation echoes can be accurately estimated even in cases where clutter-to-signal ratios are high by using a parametric time domain method (PTDM).

Based on radar signal simulations, the accuracy of the proposed method is evaluated for various observation conditions. The performance of PTDM is demonstrated by the implementation of the staggered PRT at the Colorado State University–University of Chicago–Illinois State Water Survey (CSU–CHILL). Based on this study, it is found that the accuracy of the retrieval is comparable to the current state of the art methods applied to the uniformly sampled observations and that the estimated velocity is unbiased for the complete Nyquist range.

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