TRIPLE FREQUENCY RADAR REFLECTIVITY SIGNATURES OF SNOW: OBSERVATIONS AND COMPARISONS TO THEORETICAL ICE PARTICLE SCATTERING MODELS by

An observation-based study is presented that utilizes aircraft data from the 2003 Wakasa Bay AMSR Precipitation Validation Campaign to assess recent advances in the modeling of microwave scattering properties of realistic ice particles in the atmosphere. Previous work has suggested that a triple-frequency reflectivity framework appears to have utility for identifying key microphysical properties of snow, potentially providing much-needed constraints on significant sources of uncertainty in current active microwave snowfall retrieval algorithms. However, these results were based solely on a modeling framework. In contrast, this study considers the triple-frequency approach from an observational perspective using airborne radar observations from the Wakasa Bay field campaign. After accounting for several challenges with the observational dataset, such as beam mismatching and attenuation, observed dual wavelength ratio (DWR) results are presented that confirm both the utility of a multi-frequency approach to snowfall retrieval and the validity of the unique signatures predicted by complex aggregate ice particle scattering models. This analysis provides valuable insight into the microphysics of frozen precipitation that can in turn be applied to more readily available single and dual-frequency systems, providing guidance for future precipitation retrieval algorithms.