Improvement in determination of ice water content from two-dimensional particle imagery. Part II: Applications to collected data

Abstract

In Part I of this two-part series, a new relationship for ice particle mass M was derived based on an expanded dataset of photographed ice particles and melted drops. The new relationship resulted in a reduction of nearly 50% in the rms error in M. In this paper, new relationships for computing particle mass and ice water content from 2D particle imagery are compared with other relationships previously used in the literature. Comparison of the old and new relationships, when applied to data collected in natural clouds, shows that results using the old relationships differ from the new relationships by up to a factor of 3, depending on particle size and shape. One of the new relationships can be applied to existing (archived) datasets of two-dimensional images, provided that the number of occulted pixels in each image (i.e., projected area) is available. © 2006 American Meteorological Society.