We present a new event-scale catalog of stable isotopic measurements from 5 years of storm events at 4 sites in southern California, which is used to understand the storm to storm controls on the isotopic composition of precipitation and validate the event-scale performance of an isotope-enabled GCM simulation (IsoGSM) (Yoshimura et al. 2008). These analyses are motivated to improve the interpr...

Gridded precipitation data sets are frequently used to evaluate climate models or to remove model output biases. Although precipitation data are error prone due to the high spatio-temporal variability of precipitation and due to considerable measurement errors, relatively few attempts have been made to account for observational uncertainty in model evaluation or in bias correction studies. In t...

This paper presents the operational implementation of a 1D+4D-Var assimilation system of rain affected satellite observations at ECMWF. The first part describes the methodology and performance analysis of the 1D-Var retrieval scheme in clouds and precipitation that uses SSM/I microwave radiance observations for the estimation of total column water vapor. The second part shows the global and lon...

With the three-dimensional field of velocity predicted by numerical methods it is possible to predict the moisture distribution and hence the occurrence of large-scale saturation. A three-parameter model was used to predict the 12-hour precipitation for the early stages of the storms of November 24, 1950 and November 5, 1953, neglecting cloud storage, supersaturation, a possible lack of condens...

Persistent, 10-km-scale gradients in climatological precipitation tied to topography are documented with a finescale rain and snow gauge network in the Matheny Ridge area of the Olympic Mountains of Washington State. Precipitation totals are 50% higher on top of an 800-m-high ridge relative to valleys on either side, 10 km distant. Operational fifth-generation Pennsylvania State University–NCAR...

Quantifying the sensitivity of warm rain to aerosols is important for constraining climate model estimates of aerosol indirect effects. In this study, the precipitation sensitivity to cloud droplet number concentration (Nd) in satellite retrievals is quantified by applying the precipitation susceptibility metric to a combined CloudSat/Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer data set of st...