Distributional correspondence of 94-GHz radar reflectivity with the variation in water cloud properties over the northwestern Pacific and China.

This paper studied the behavior of 94-GHz radar reflectivity ( Z e ) with variation in the properties of low-level water clouds, such as the effective droplet radius ( r e ), geometrical thickness ( D cld ), and liquid water path (LWP), over the northwest Pacific and China. The changes in the distribution of max Z e (the largest Z e within a cloud layer) were examined in terms of variation in the cloud parameters such as small, mid and large categories, while max Z e had monomodal distributions regarding variation in r e and D cld , that appeared bimodal in the small category of LWP. It was confirmed that the small category of LWP contained both non-precipitating clouds in the incipient stage and raining clouds in the dissipating stage. Next, optically measured particle size was combined with LWP derived from the microwave measurement to classify the precipitation type. Applying max Z e and D cld to the analysis of classified precipitation types corroborated the importance of D cld for examining the occurrence of precipitation. Finally, the position of max Z e relative to the cloud top was investigated using a measure of the probability of precipitation (POP) according to variation in r e . The results showed that the Pacific and China had ‘bow’ and ‘funnel’ shapes, respectively. The emergence of these shapes according to the variation in r e was interpreted as the enhancement of Z e due to droplet collisional growth and the attenuation of Z e by the presence of large particles. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of smaller particles (<10 μm in radius) reinforced the idea of rapid, efficient particle growth in the lower part of the cloud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]