An Investigation of a Northeast U.S. Cyclone Event Without Well-Defined Snow Banding During IMPACTS

Abstract

On 7 February 2020 a relatively deep cyclone (~980 hPa) with mid-level frontogenesis produced heavy snow (20-30 mm liquid equivalent) over western and central New York State. Despite these characteristics, the precipitation was not organized into a narrow band of intensive snowfall. This event occurred during the Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms (IMPACTS) field campaign. Using coordinated flight legs across New York State, a remote sensing aircraft (ER-2) sampled above the cloud while a P-3 aircraft collected in-cloud data. These data are used to validate several Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model simulations at 2-km and 0.67-km grid spacing using different initial and boundary conditions (RAP, GFS, and ERA5 analyses) and microphysics schemes (Thompson and P3). The differences between the WRF runs are used to explore sensitivity to initial conditions and microphysics schemes. All 18–24 h runs realistically produced a broad sloping region of frontogenesis at mid-levels typically; however, there were relatively large (20–30%) uncertainties in the magnitude of this forcing using different analyses and initialization times. The differences in surface precipitation distribution are small (< 10%) among the microphysics schemes, likely because there was little riming in the region of heaviest precipitation. Those runs with frontogenesis closest to the RAP analysis and a surface precipitation underprediction of 20–30% have too little ice aloft and at low-levels, suggesting deficiencies in ice generation and snow growth aloft in those runs. The 0.67-km grid produced more realistic convective cells aloft, but only 5–10% more precipitation than the 2-km grid.