Snowfall

Abstract

Over the last years, our capabilities to remotely sense snowfall have significantly increased. Significant progress has been made in three areas. Firstly, new in situ and ground-based remote sensing techniques allow us to better specify snowfall size distribution, fall speed, and particle shapes. Secondly, our understanding of basic interactions between nonspherical frozen particles and the radiation field has advanced considerably. Thirdly, with the advent of spaceborne radars and improved radiometers, it has become feasible to study snowfall globally from space. While initial studies show very promising results, many of the related retrieval techniques are still in their infancy. In the future, significant effort will have to be put into characterizing retrieval accuracies and uncertainties.