Long-Duration Freezing Rain Events over North America: Regional Climatology and Thermodynamic Evolution

Abstract

Abstract Freezing rain can cause severe impacts, particularly when it persists for many hours. In this paper, we present the climatology of long-duration (6 or more hours) freezing rain events in the United States and Canada from 1979 to 2016. We identify three focus regions from this climatology and examine the archetypal thermodynamic evolution of events in each region using surface and radiosonde observations. Long-duration events occur most frequently in the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada, where freezing rain typically begins as lower-tropospheric warm-air advection develops the warm layer aloft. This warm-air advection and the latent heat of fusion released when rain freezes at the surface erode the cold layer, and freezing rain transitions to rain once the surface temperature reaches 0°C. In the southeastern United States, a larger percentage of events are of long duration than elsewhere in North America. Weak surface cold-air advection and evaporative cooling in the particularly dry onset cold layers there prevent surface temperatures from rising substantially during events. Finally, the south-central United States has a regional maximum in the occurrence of the top 1% of events by duration (18 or more hours), despite the relative rarity of freezing rain there. These events are associated with particularly warm/deep onset warm layers, with persistent low-level cold-air advection maintaining the cold layer. The thermodynamic evolutions we have identified highlight characteristics that are key to supporting persistent freezing rain in each region and may warrant particular attention from forecasters tasked with predicting these events.