Exposing the multiple personalities of precipitation by Dusan Zrnic and Alexander Ryzhkov W ind, temperature and precipitation are the weather conditions that affect our daily activities.
Some precipitation is indispensable, too much is disastrous.
Remote classification and measurement of precipitation was an evasive goal of radar meteorologists until the advent of polarimetric radar. Polarimetry entails probing of precipitation with orthogonal electric fields. For example, horizontally and vertically polarized electric fields interact differently with contrasting hydrometeors, such as rain or hail, to produce tell-tale signatures in the fields of polarimetric variables. NSSL began accumulating a gamut of polarimetric radar data in 1992. Soon thereafter, in collaboration with the University of Oklahoma, we began to develop an automatic procedure for discrimination of hydrometeors.