Comparison of Airborne W-band Radar and In-situ Cloud Microphysics Data during AIRS II: Nov 11, 2003 Case

Research aircraft that are equipped with in-situ cloud microphysics probes and millimeter radars, similar to the one used in this study, provide coincident and closely spaced radar and cloud microphysics dataset (e.g., Wolde and Vali 2002), which will be very useful to develop and validate radar based cloud microphysics retrieval methodologies using space and ground based radars. This paper presents a comparison of an airborne radar and in-situ data collected in one of the flights during the second Alliance Icing Research Study (AIRS II) that was conducted between November 2003 and February 2004 over the Mirabel airport near Montreal, Canada and the surrounding regions in Ontario and Quebec. AIRS II was an international collaborative aircraft icing study using arrays of ground-based and airborne in-situ and remote-sensing instruments (Isaac et al. 2005). One of the scientific objectives of AIRS II was to develop techniques for identification of cloud particle compositions using remote sensors. The data used in this paper were collected on November 11, 2003, during which the NRC Convair aircraft sampled clouds consisting of glaciated, mixed phase and supercooled layers. The ultimate objective of this research is to determine the radar signatures of different cloud particle types based on the radar and insitu data analysis, and to develop automated microphysical retrieval algorithm from radar data.