Novel Insights from Studying Raindrop Arrivals on Sub-Second Timescales

Abstract:

Early rain disdrometers were designed in order to develop reliable quantitative estimates of rainfall rates directly from the measurement of individual drop properties. Newer disdrometers are capable of recording and storing more information than ever before, including drop arrival times with precision better than 1 second. Though this additional information may not be overly useful for rainfall rate estimation, a number of new insights about rainfall microphysics may be obtained by utilizing the full available temporal resolution of these instruments. Here, we use data acquired from a 2-Dimensional Video Disdrometer to explicitly explore raindrop temporal clustering on sub-second timescales. Implications for rain measurement strategies are explored.