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Purpose: This lab will provide a hands-on approach and allow you to become familiar with rain gauges used to measure rainfall. This lab will also revisit out quantitative reasoning skills, putting them in the framework of meteorological instrumentation, and further increase your confidence with these skills and why they’re pertinent to meteorology.
Learning Objectives: Become familiar with meteorological instrumentation used for rainfall collection and visualize rainfall amounts. Interpret radar maps and deduce key meteorological information.
Precipitation Processes
Precipitation Processes
Precipitation in the atmosphere can form in our atmosphere in four main processes depending on if it is a warm or cold cloud.
Collision: Large droplets/ice crystals fall faster than smaller ones causing them to collide as they fall through the cloud.
Coalescence: Colliding droplets stick to each other/merge together.
Accretion: Falling ice crystals may freeze supercooled droplets on contact, producing larger ice particles.
Aggregation: Falling ice crystals may collide and stick to other ice crystals producing snowflakes.
Precipitation in the atmosphere can occur at the surface in 4 ways: Rain, freezing rain, sleet, and snow. They happen at different times depending on the vertical temperature profiles. There are different instruments used to measure precipitation.
Radar is another way we can measure and observe precipitation. We will learn about two different types of radar products:
Base Reflectivity: Indicates how strong showers/storms are. The more yellow / red / pink reflectivity values, the stronger the thunderstorm.
Radial Velocity: Doppler radar can detect if an object is moving towards or away from it. Greens indicate towards, reds indicate away. Using this, meteorological phenomena can be seen via radar.
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