Using an Instrumentation Suite to Derive Mass for Lake-Effect and Synoptic Snowfall near Buffalo, NY

Wintertime precipitation events greatly impact the Great Lakes region. Snowfall has socioeconomic impacts on transportation, recreation, agriculture, and infrastructure, as well as environmental impacts on regional ecology and hydrology. The extent of these impacts is dictated by storm type which induces differences in snowfall characteristics and poses a challenge for forecasting snowfall. To improve forecasting of snow events, it is imperative to understand how snowfall event type, mesoscale versus synoptic, dictates what an observer sees at the ground level. One location with extreme snowfall is Buffalo, NY, which is located on the eastern shore of Lake Erie and experiences large lake-effect and synoptic snow accumulations. The University of Illinois System for Characterizing and Measuring Precipitation (SCAMP) is a suite of deployable ground-based instruments consisting of a profiling Micro Rain Radar-2 (MRR-2), a Parsivel2 laser disdrometer, a precipitation weighing gauge, and a weather sensor. SCAMP measures various precipitation characteristics, such as precipitation amounts, radar reflectivities and Doppler velocities, and hydrometeor particle size distributions, supplemented by environmental conditions. SCAMP was deployed east of Buffalo, NY, for two full winter seasons (2021-2022 and 2022-2023), sampling many synoptic and mesoscale snow events. The snowfall observations provide a better understanding of how event type impacts surface snowfall characteristics. Additionally, the observations from SCAMP allow for multi-sensor retrievals of mass. This permits the development of mass parameterizations of snowfall and can be used to reduce the uncertainties in calculating quantities such as snow rate (S) and reflectivity (Z). The results are estimates of Z and S that agree more with measurements from the MRR-2 and the precipitation gauge, particularly during events with low-wind and/or mixed-phase precipitation. This in turn provides an opportunity to retrieve Z-S relationships and understand how these relationships change with respect to event type. Here we will discuss our technique for developing mass retrievals using the Parsivel2 and weighing gauge and examine variability in derived snowfall characteristics across and within observed storm types.