Comparison of precipitation measurement by DSG5 and Parsivel present weather instrument

Abstract

As a new type of raindrop distrometer, the operational DSG5 present weather sensor has the ability to identify not only the weather phenomena but also the raindrop size distribution, which is important to the rain microphysical and dynamical analysis. It' s very important to understand the raindrop distribution observation performance with different instruments type, which is useful for the further research. In this paper, the microphysical parameters inverted by the DSG5 and Parsivel are compared with a total of 1503 samples for 8 liquid rian events during 2018 in Heishan station, Xianning, Hubei Province. The results show that: (1) Compared with the AWS (Automatic Weather Station) precipitation, the Parsivel data has a higher consistency with the AWS, and DSG5 is somewhat smaller than them. (2) Compared with the DSG5, Nw (the normalized intercept) observed by Parsivel is larger and the Dm (mass-weighted mean diameter) is smaller. (3) For RR ≥ 20 mm·h-1, the number concentration which the diameter smaller (larger) than 3 mm observed by Parsivel is higher (lower) than that of the DSG5. (4) For raindrops diameter larger than 4 mm, the falling velocity observed by Parsivel is slightly lower than the theoretical value, and the falling velocity observed by DSG5 is significantly larger. The DSG5 has good observation performance for the weather phenomena. Compared with Parsivel, the weather phenomena observed by DSG5 during two snowfall events are more consistent with the manually observation.

Keywords

• raindrop size distribution
• present weather sensor
• weather phenomenon
• observation data comparison