Investigation of riming within mixed-phase stratiform clouds using Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model

Abstract

In this study, we investigated stratiform precipitation associated with an upper-level westerly trough and a cold front over northern China between 30 Apr. and 1 May 2009. We employed the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model (version 3.4.1) to perform high-resolution numerical simulations of rainfall. We also conducted simulations with two microphysics schemes and sensitivity experiments without riming of snow and changing cloud droplet number concentrations (CDNCs) to determine the effect of snow riming on cloud structure and precipitation. Then we compared our results with CloudSat, Doppler radar and rain gauge observations. The comparison with the Doppler radar observations suggested that the WRF model was quite successful in capturing the timing and location of the stratiform precipitation region. Further comparisons with the CloudSat retrievals suggested that both microphysics schemes overestimated ice and liquid water contents. The sensitivity experiments without riming of snow suggested that the presence or absence of riming significantly influenced the precipitation distribution, but only slightly affected total accumulated precipitation. Without riming of snow, the changes of updrafts from the two microphysics schemes were different due to a different consideration of ice particle capacitance and latent heat effect of riming on deposition. While sensitivity experiments with three different CDNC values of 100, 250 and 1000cm−3 suggested variations in snow riming rates, changing CDNC had little impact on precipitation.