Combining disdrometer, microscopic photography, and cloud radar to study distributions of hydrometeor types, size and fall velocity

Abstract Addressing solid precipitation poses additional challenges compared to warm rain due to complex hydrometeor shapes involved, including the dependence of fall velocity on hydrometeor sizes, hydrometeor size distributions, and hydrometeor classification. This study is an extension of our previous work (Niu et al. 2010) to address these challenges by combining measurements from a PARSIVEL disdrometer, microscope photography, and millimeter wavelength cloud radar. The combined measurements are analyzed to classify the precipitation hydrometeor types, examine the dependence of fall velocity on hydrometeor sizes for different hydrometeor types, and determine the best distributions to describe the hydrometeor size distributions of different hydrometeor types. The results show: (1) Hydrometeors can be classified to four main types of raindrop, graupel, snowflake and mixed-phase according to the dependence of terminal velocity on sizes, corresponding microscope photos and cloud radar observations; (2) There are significant scatters in fall velocity for a given hydrometer size velocities, and the fall velocity spread for the solid hydrometeors appear wider than that for raindrops across hydrometeor sizes, with that for the mixed-phase precipitation being largest, suggesting that the effects of hydrometeor shape on hydrometeor fall velocities; (3) Hydrometeor size distributions for the four types can all be well described by the Gamma or Weibull distribution; Weibull (Gamma) distribution performs better when skewness is less (larger) than 2.