Empirical Relationships for Estimating Liquid Water Fraction of Melting Snowflakes

The liquid water fraction of individual snowflakesfis an important parameter when calculating the radar reflectivity of a melting layer. A ground-based observation offat Nagaoka, Japan, was conducted by using dye-treated filter papers that were kept at a temperature of 0°C. From the results of these...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of applied meteorology and climatology 2014-10, Vol.53 (10), p.2232-2245
Main Authors: Misumi, Ryohei, Motoyoshi, Hiroki, Yamaguchi, Satoru, Nakai, Sento, Ishizaka, Masaaki, Fujiyoshi, Yasushi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Calibration
Clouds
Empirical analysis
Error rates
Estimating
Filter paper
Flux
Ground-based observation
Ice
Liquids
Melting
Meteorology
Precipitation
Radar
Raindrops
Rainfall intensity
Snow
Snowflakes
Studies
Water
Water filtration
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Summary:The liquid water fraction of individual snowflakesfis an important parameter when calculating the radar reflectivity of a melting layer. A ground-based observation offat Nagaoka, Japan, was conducted by using dye-treated filter papers that were kept at a temperature of 0°C. From the results of these measurements, which consisted of 6179 particles taken with 44 sheets of filter paper, two empirical relationships are proposed. The first is a relationship between the ratio of liquid water flux to total precipitation intensity (FL ; taking values from 0 to 1) and meteorological surface data. The second is a relationship to estimatefusing the melted diameter of a snowflake, median mass diameter, andFL . It was determined that the root-mean-square errors for estimatingFL andfby using these relationships were 0.160 and 0.144, respectively. It was also found that the ratio of raindrop flux to the total precipitation intensityFR was always below 0.1 whenFL was less than 0.6 but increased rapidly whenFL exceeded 0.8.
ISSN:1558-8424
1558-8432
DOI:10.1175/jamc-d-13-0169.1