11th Conference on Atmospheric Radiation and the 11th Conference on Cloud Physics

Monday, 3 June 2002: 3:45 PM
Ice-cloud size effective particle size parameterization derived using combined lidar and radar data
D. P. Donovan, KNMI, De Bilt, Netherlands
Poster PDF (282.9 kB)
A newly developed procedure for estimating ice cloud effective particle size and ice water content (IWC) using combined lidar and radar signals has been applied to several months of data from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program's Southern Great Plains site. Though considerable scatter is present in the retrieval results, on average, the data show a clear dependence of effective particle size on both temperature and ice water content. The data are used to construct a parameterization based on a bimodal ice particle size-distribution whose characteristics depend both on temperature and IWC. In this presentation the combined lidar and radar technique will be briefly overviewed and the application of the technique to ARM data will be discussed.The derived size distribution parameterization is compared with existing parameterizations that are based on in-situ data from aircraft mounted instruments.

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