Open AccessWind Effects on the Shape of Raindrop Size Distribution
Author(s) -
Firat Yener Testik,
Bin Pei
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of hydrometeorology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.733
H-Index - 123
eISSN - 1525-755X
pISSN - 1525-7541
DOI - 10.1175/jhm-d-16-0211.1
Subject(s) - breakup , wind profiler , environmental science , disdrometer , atmospheric sciences , convection , precipitation , wind speed , drizzle , meteorology , radar , physics , mechanics , computer science , telecommunications , rain gauge
The wind effects on the shape of drop size distribution (DSD) and the driving microphysical processes for the DSD shape evolution were investigated using the dataset from the Midlatitude Continental Convective Clouds Experiment (MC3E). The quality-controlled DSD spectra from MC3E were grouped for each of the rainfall events by considering the precipitation type (stratiform vs convective) and liquid water content for the analysis. The DSD parameters (e.g., mass-weighted mean diameter) and the fitted DSD slopes for these grouped spectra showed statistically significant trends with varying wind speed. Increasing wind speeds were observed to modify the DSD shapes by increasing the number of small drops and decreasing the number of large drops, indicating that the raindrop breakup process governs the DSD shape evolution. Both spontaneous and collisional raindrop breakup modes were analyzed to elucidate the process responsible for the DSD shape evolution with varying wind speed. The analysis revealed that the collisional breakup process controls the wind-induced DSD shape. The findings of this study are of importance in DSD parameterizations that are essential to a wide variety of applications such as radar rainfall retrievals and hydrologic models.