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News: Importance Of Snow To Global Precipitation

How Much Snow is Your Rain?

Title: Importance of snow to global precipitation
Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2015GL065497
Product tags: 2B-GEOPROF, 2C-PRECIP-COLUMN

In the tropics, rain has nothing to do with snow, but elsewhere across the globe, much of the precipitation comes from melting snow. Field and Heymsfield have set out to find out just what fraction of precipitation events are from melted snow, and how many of those are snow, compared to rain. To do this, they use the 2B-GEOPROF and 2C-PRECIP-COLUMN data products. 2B-GEOPROF provides the location of the clouds, as well as an indicator of how good the radar signal is, allowing scientists to use only the highest quality radar signals for their data. 2C-PRECIP-COLUMN, on the other hand, provides the freezing height of the clouds, which indicates how much of the cloud is frozen, allowing scientists to conclude if it’s an ice-cloud or a liquid cloud, as well as whether it’s raining or snowing. This kind of research provides unique insights into the relationships throughout the global climate, and indicates how snow in some areas can affect rain in others.

To learn more about the various data sources used to complete this study, see the results, or just check out the beautiful model images created, read the full article here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2015GL065497

This study builds off of Mülmenstädt et al.’s “Frequency of occurrence of rain from liquid-, mixed- and ice-phase clouds derived from A-Train satellite retrievals,” which can be read here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2015GL064604

Synopsis Author: Kalina Velev, JPL