Abstract

Getting a better understanding on precipitation formation in mountains ain’t easy and requires new observational techniques combined with state-of-the-art retrievals and modelling. The project CORSIPP aims to under riming and secondary ice production (SIP) processes in complex terrain. For that purpose, a scanning W-band cloud radar and a novel video in situ snowfall sensor gathered extensive data for the entire winter season 2022-2023 in the Colorado Rocky Mountains as part of the SAIL campaign (Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory: https://sail.lbl.gov). An overview of the project is given in the Multimedia PageFlow created by the communication department of Leipzig University (https://unileipzig.pageflow.io/dem-schnee-auf-der-spur).
Combining spectral polarimetric and multi frequency Doppler radar observations with empirical machine learning retrieval techniques, we identied riming and SIP events and quantied their impact on snowfall rates. Using the extensive collocated measurements of SAIL allowed us to relate the observed process rates to environmental conditions, also enabling improved representations of radiative transfer in climate models.