VAWS: Diagnosis and Validation of Surface Precipitation Type

Speaker: Heather Reeves, Research Associate (CIMMS/NSSL)

In this talk, several issues related to surface hydrometeor classification are discussed. These include uncertainty in the observations, algorithms used to deduce the precipitation type from numerical weather prediction models, and the uncertainty in the models themselves.

One of these issues, the uncertainty in the algorithms, is addressed by reinventing the way hydrometeor classification is performed in NWP models. This new classifier is referred to as the Spectral Bin Classifier (SBC). Its design and performance metrics will be presented.