Abstract. To be able to estimate snowfall accurately is important for both weather and climate applications. Ground-based weather radars and space-based satellite sensors are often used as viable alternatives to rain-gauges to estimate precipitation in this context. The Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR) onboard CloudSat is especially proving to be a useful tool to map snowfall globally, in part due to its high sensitivity to light precipitation and ability to provide near-global vertical structure. The importance of having snowfall estimates from CloudSat/CPR further increases in the high latitude regions as other ground-based observations become sparse and passive satellite sensors suffer from inherent limitations. Here we intercompared snowfall estimates from two observing systems, CloudSat and Swerad, the Swedish national weather radar network. Swerad offers one of the best calibrated data sets of precipitation amount at very high latitudes that are anchored to rain-gauges and that can be exploited to evaluate usefulness of CloudSat/CPR snowfall estimates in the polar regions. In total 7.2×105 matchups of CloudSat and Swerad over Sweden were inter-compared covering all but summer months (October to May) from 2008 to 2010. The intercomparison shows encouraging agreement between these two observing systems despite their different sensitivities and user applications. The best agreement is observed when CloudSat passes close to a Swerad station (46–82 km), when the observational conditions for both systems are comparable. Larger disagreements outside this range suggest that both platforms have difficulty with shallow snow but for different reasons. The correlation between Swerad and CloudSat degrades with increasing distance from the nearest Swerad station as Swerad's sensitivity decreases as a function of distance and Swerad also tends to overshoots low level precipitating systems further away from the station, leading to underestimation of snowfall rate and occasionally missing the precipitation altogether. Further investigations of various statistical metrics, such as the probability of detection, false alarm rate, hit rate, and the Hanssen–Kuipers skill scores, and the sensitivity of these metrics to snowfall rate and the distance from the radar station, were carried out. The results of these investigations highlight the strengths and the limitations of both observing systems at the lower and upper ends of snowfall distributions and the range of uncertainties that could be expected from these systems in the high latitude regions.
Weather Radar Network Benefit Model for Tornadoes
