Spectral polarimetry for microphysical studies of rain and hail during
the RELAMPAGO campaign
Abstract
This paper presents microphysical inference retrievals obtained from
spectral polarimetry during the Relampago (Remote sensing of
Electrification, Lightning, And Mesoscale/Microscale Processes with
Adaptive Ground Observations) campaign. Spectral processing has been an
essential part of weather radar moments estimation for a long period of
time. Various processing can be performed in the spectral domain
including precipitation detection in presence of strong clutter and
noise, clutter & interference mitigation by algorithms such as GMAP,
object-oriented filters and many more. However spectral applications to
polarimetry have been rare. The C band CSU-CHIVO radar that was deployed
in Cordoba region in Argentina between June 2018 and April 2019 during
the Relampago campaign, recorded some of the tallest storms in the world
characterized by strong wind shear, updrifts, turbulence and occurrence
of severe hail and rain. The polarimetric spectrum in precipitation with
rain and hail mixtures were characterized. This Spectral polarimetry
revealed different spectral characteristics including multi-modal
spectrum, spectral broadening, slopes in spectral differential
reflectivity and lowering of coherency spectrum. These results
characterized occurrence of mixed hydrometeor types in a radar
resolution volume such as presence of rain and hail mixture, large drops
formation and size sorting. Spectral displays are inherently noisy, and
the paper also presented methodology to obtain clean quality spectrum
implementing spectral quality index, that is used to process the
observations and the results are presented.