Radar remote sensing of alpine and antarctic solid precipitation

Thèse soutenue par Claudio Duran-Alarcon en 2019

Solid precipitation plays an important role in the Earth’s climate system, as well as for the maintenance of ecosystems and the development of human society. The large uncertainty in precipitation estimates and the discrepancies within climate model projections make this component of the hydrological cycle important as a research topic. Remote sensing allows to monitor precipitation and clouds in regions where in-situ observations are scarce and scattered, but with limited temporal resolution and a blind zone close to the ground level for spaceborne sensors, and limited visibility in the lower atmosphere in complex terrain for ground-based radars.

The objectives of this dissertation are the following : 1) to characterize cloud and precipitation in Antarctica, detecting the presence of supercooled liquid and ice particles near the ground level using a ground-based 532-nm depolarization lidar ; 2) to characterize the vertical structure of the precipitation in two contrasted but important regions of the cryosphere, Antarctica and the Alps, in the low troposphere using ground-based radars.

In this study, a cloud and precipitation hydrometeor detection method is proposed using lidar data, complemented with a K-band micro rain radar (MRR) to improve the detection of precipitation, both instruments deployed at the Dumont d’Urville (DDU) station in East Antarctica. A method based on lidar depolarization and attenuated backscattering coefficient and the use of k-means clustering is developed for the particle classification. The classification of cloud and precipitation particles provides the vertical distribution of supercooled liquid water, as well as planar oriented ice and randomly oriented ice particles. The comparison between ground-based and satellite-derived classifications shows consistent patterns for the vertical distribution of supercooled liquid water in clouds.

The vertical structure of precipitation near the surface is analyzed using the Doppler moments derived from three MRR profiles at DDU, the Princess Elisabeth (PE) station, at the interior of East Antarctica, and at the Col de Porte (CDP) station, in the French Alps. These analyses demonstrate that local climate plays an important role in the vertical structure of the precipitation. In Antarctica, the strong katabatic winds blowing from the high plateau down to the coast decrease the radar reflectivity factor near the surface due to the sublimation of the snowfall particles. Doppler moments also provide rich information to understand precipitation processes, such as aggregation and riming, as observed at DDU and CDP.

The results also show that in the interior of the Antarctic continent a significant part (47%) of the precipitation profiles completely sublimate before reaching the surface, due to the dry atmospheric conditions, while in the coast of Antarctica it corresponds to about the third part (36%). In the Alps, this percentage is reduced to 15%. The major occurrence of particle sublimation is observed below the altitude where CloudSat profiles are contaminated by ground clutter. Therefore, this phenomenon cannot be fully captured from space with the current generation of sensors.

This dissertation contributes to the study of the vertical structure of snowfall in the low troposphere, useful for the evaluation of precipitation remote sensing products, which may have severe limitations in the vicinity of the surface.