Abstract:
It is well realized that the in-situ measurement results provide significant information for the microphysical parameterization in weather and climate models. Since 1960, there have been made a large number of in-situ measurements for cloud-precipitation microphysical properties with the aim at understanding the cloud-precipitation microphysical processes, and thus improving the cloud microphysical parameterizations in numerical models. The cloud-precipitation microphysical properties include particle size distribution and concentration, as well as liquid water content of a cloud and rain. Those measurements have yielded some useful information about cloud-precipitation microphysics over China. The main results are as follows: (1) various particles' total number concentrations vary greatly, which occurs however in certain scale distances only; (2) the gamma-function distribution has been widely used to describe the size distributions of cloud droplets in stratiform clouds, but fitted parameters have a wide range of variations; (3) both the exponential-and the gamma-function distributions are suitable for representing the raindrops size distributions (RSDs) of the rains originated from stratiform clouds, and the gamma-function distribution has been applied widely to describe RSDs of the rains originated from both convective and mixed (stratiform and cumuliform) clouds; (4) there is a higher ice nuclei concentration over China than that in other regions over the world, and the dependence of ice nuclei concentration on temperature is consistent, with approximately a expoentially increasing with decreasing temperature; (5) the exponential-function distribution is well adopted to represent the size distributions of ice crystals, snow crystals, and hailstones sampled at several locations; and (6) the sum of a modified gamma distribution and a Junge power-law distribution are used for describing aerosol particle size distributions. All these may be helpful for verifying the physical processes and hydrometeor fields simulated by a microphysical parameterization and improving the parameterization schemes in numerical models in the future. In addition, such comprehensive summary and analysis of the previous works as done in this work might also benefit designing new observation programs.