Impacts of Snow-to-Liquid Ratio Relationship on an Experimental Gridded Snow Rate Product

Quantifying snowfall remains a substantial problem. While the number of sites where snow is observed is in the thousands in the CONUS alone, these sites represent point observations. Moreover, these point observations are usually manual measurements, observing snow over twenty-four hour lookback windows. The nature of these observations make the construction of a continuous observation field of snowfall a challenge.

The typical way of constructing a continuous snowfall field is to start with a quantitative precipitation estimate (QPE) field, and multiplying the QPE by a snow-to-liquid ratio (SLR). The goal of this research is to quantify the error and spread in snowfall analyses generated from various operationally-used SLR relationships. QPEs from the Multi-Radar Multi Sensor operational system are used to generate hourly snowfalls, which are accumulated over twenty-four hours, and verified against snowfall observations from the Global Historical Climatology Network-daily dataset. The results of this verification, including a discussion of the event-to-event and regional variability, will be presented. The implications of these results for real-time snowfall analyses will be discussed.