Evaluating seasonal and regional distribution of snowfall in regional climate model simulations in the Arctic

von Lerber, Annakaisa; Mech, Mario; Rinke, Annette; Zhang, Damao; Lauer, Melanie; Radovan, Ana; Gorodetskaya, Irina; Crewell, Susanne

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-7287-2022

Articles | Volume 22, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-7287-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-7287-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 22, issue 11

Research article

|

07 Jun 2022

Research article |

| 07 Jun 2022

Evaluating seasonal and regional distribution of snowfall in regional climate model simulations in the Arctic

Annakaisa von Lerber, Mario Mech, Annette Rinke, Damao Zhang, Melanie Lauer, Ana Radovan, Irina Gorodetskaya, and Susanne Crewell

Data sets

The ERA-Interim archive Version 2.0 P. Berrisford, D. P. Dee, P. Poli, R. Brugge, M. Fielding, M. Fuentes, P. W. Kållberg, S. Kobayashi, S. Uppala, and A. Simmons https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era-interim

Model code and software

PAMTRA: Passive and Active Microwave TRAnsfer tool v1.0 (v1.0.0) M. Mech, M. Maahn, D. Ori, and E. Orlandi https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3582992

Short summary

Snowfall is an important climate indicator. However, microphysical snowfall processes are challenging for atmospheric models. In this study, the performance of a regional climate model is evaluated in modeling the spatial and temporal distribution of Arctic snowfall when compared to CloudSat satellite observations. Excellent agreement in averaged annual snowfall rates is found, and the shown methodology offers a promising diagnostic tool to investigate the shown differences further.