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Importance of snow to global precipitation
Author(s) -
Field P. R.,
Heymsfield A. J.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1002/2015gl065497
Subject(s) - precipitation , snow , environmental science , climatology , tropics , radar , middle latitudes , subtropics , precipitation types , altitude (triangle) , atmospheric sciences , meteorology , geology , geography , telecommunications , geometry , mathematics , fishery , computer science , biology
Precipitation controls the availability of drinking water and viability of the land to support agriculture. Failure to accurately predict the location, magnitude, and frequency of precipitation impacts not only numerical weather forecasting but also climate modeling. It has been proposed that most rainfall events originate from ice that has melted to form rain. Here we use remote sensing from spaceborne cloud radar to quantify that idea. A new metric is constructed to quantify the fraction of rain events at the surface that are linked to snow melting at a higher altitude. CloudSat is used to show the global variation of the importance of snow in the precipitation process. In the tropics, subtropics, midlatitude and polar regions 0.3, 0.4, 0.8, and >0.9, respectively, of all precipitation events (>1 mm/d) are linked to the production of snow in clouds.