North Slope of Alaska Snow Intensive Operational Period Field Campaign Report
- Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA (United States)
- Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
- Univ. of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK (United States)
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
The campaign was motivated by the need to improve the quantification of measurements of ice-phase precipitation in the Arctic and was by the acquisition and deployment of the new X- and Ka/W-band radars. These radars opened up an opportunity for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility to obtain spatial estimates of snowfall rates using the polarimetric X-band measurements and dual-frequency measurements (using different combinations of the three wavelengths). However, calculations of X- and Ka-band radar back-scattering of ice crystal aggregates with their complex structure suggest that the commonly used T-matrix approach (Matrosov et al. 2007) for modeling the radar back-scattering underestimates the reflectivity by several decibels, with errors increasing with increasing radar frequency (Botta et al. 2010, 2011). Moreover, the X-band polarimetric measurements and the Ka/W-band measurements are sensitive to the assumed shape of the snow (Botta et al. 2011). One of the five ARM two-dimensional video disdrometers (manufactured by Joanneum Research) were deployed in Barrow at the ARM North Slope of Alaska (NSA) site from 1 October, 2011 to 31 May, 2012 in an attempt to use the instrument in a novel way. The instrument was originally designed to measure the drop size distribution of rain but it seemed worthwhile to explore its capability to quantify ice precipitation particle size and shape distributions in the cold north for scattering calculations and precipitation estimations. Furthermore, this deployment gave us an opportunity to see how reliable it could be in arctic conditions.
- Research Organization:
- DOE Office of Science Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
- Contributing Organization:
- Univ. of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK (United States); ARM Climate Research Facility, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-7601830
- OSTI ID:
- 1357806
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-SC-ARM-17-018
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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