A General Approach for Deriving the Properties of Cirrus and Stratiform Ice Cloud Particles

Abstract

A new approach is described for calculating the mass (m) and terminal velocity (V t ) of ice particles from airborne and balloon-borne imaging probe data as well as its applications for remote sensing and modeling studies. Unlike past studies that derived these parameters from the maximum (projected) dimension (D) and habit alone, the ''two-parameter approach'' uses D and the particle's projected cross-sectional area (A). Expressions were developed that relate the area ratio (A r ; the projected area of an ice particle normalized by the area of a circle with diameter D) to its effective density ( e ) and to V t .