Vertical Air Motion Retrieved from Dual-Frequency Profiler Observations

Abstract

Abstract The 50-MHz profiler operating near Darwin, Northwest Territory, Australia, is sensitive to both turbulent clear-air (Bragg) and hydrometeor (Rayleigh) scattering processes. Below the radar bright band, the two scattering peaks are observed as two well-separated peaks in the Doppler velocity spectra. The Bragg scattering peak corresponds to the vertical air motion and the Rayleigh scattering peak corresponds to the hydrometeor motion. Within the radar bright band, the Rayleigh scattering peak intensity increases and the downward velocity decreases causing the hydrometeor peak to overlap or merge with the air motion peak. If the overlap of the two peaks is not taken into account, then the vertical air motion estimate will be biased downward. This study describes a filtering procedure that identifies and removes the downward bias in vertical air motions caused by hydrometeor contamination. This procedure uses a second collocated profiler sensitive to hydrometeor motion to identify contamination in the 50-MHz profiler spectra. When applied to four rain events during the Tropical Warm Pool-International Cloud Experiment (TPW-ICE), this dual-frequency filtering method showed that approximately 50% of the single-frequency method vertical air motion estimates within the radar bright band were biased downward due to hydrometeor contamination.