Microwave Properties of Frozen Precipitation around a North Atlantic Cyclone

Abstract

Microwave brightness temperatures emanating from a North Atlantic cyclone were measured by the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) on the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellite. As other investigators have found before, low 85.5-GHz brightness temperatures (215 ± 20 K) were observed from cumulonimbus clouds along the squall line; however, 85.5-GHz microwave brightness temperatures observed from the nimbostratus clouds north of the low center were significantly higher (255 ± 20 K). In situ measurements from aircraft during the Canadian Atlantic Storm Program II showed that heavy snowfall consisting of large tenuous aggregates existed in the nimbostratus clouds at the time of the SSM/I overpass. Distributions of snow, rain, liquid cloud water, and cloud ice mass were computed from a modified version of the fifth-generation Pennsylvania State University?NCAR Mesoscale Model. That model employed a mixed-phase ice microphysics (MPIM) scheme that only considered one type of frozen hydrometeor. The frozen hydrometeor size distributions, density, and mass flux were modified to match the in situ observations where they were available and to account for the SSM/I observations using radiative transfer theory. Those revised hydrometeor representations were constrained to preserve the vertical hydrometeor mass flux distributions obtained from the MPIM scheme throughout the analysis. Frozen dense accreted particles were required near the squall line to account for the microwave scattering effect. Snow aggregates, with density that decreased with increasing size, were needed to reproduce the high brightness temperatures observed from the nimbostratus clouds.