• Atmosphere
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.261-270
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• 2015

Characteristics of snowfall and snow crystal habits have been investigated in the campaign of Experiment on Snow Storms At Yeongdong (ESSAY) using radiosonde soundings, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), and a digital camera with a magnifier for taking a photograph of snowfall crystals. The analysis period is 6 to 14 February 2014, when the accumulated snowfall amount is 192.8 cm with the longest snowfall duration of 9 days. The synoptic situations are similar to those of the previous studies such as the Low pressure system passing by the far South of the Korean peninsula along with the Siberian High extending to northern Japan, which eventually results in the northeasterly or easterly flows and the long-lasting snowfall episodes in the Yeongdong region. In general, the ice clouds tended to exist below around 2~3 km with the consistent easterly flows, and the winds shifted to northerly~northwesterly above the clouds layer. The snow crystal habits observed in the ESSAY campaign were mainly dendrite, consisting of 70% of the entire habits. The rimed habits were frequently captured when two-layered clouds were observed, probably through the process of freezing of super-cooled droplets on the ice particles. The homogeneous habit such as dendrite was shown in case of shallow clouds with its thickness of below 500 m whereas various habits were captured such as dendrites, rimed dendrites, aggregates of dendrites, plates, rimed plates, etc in the thick cloud with its thickness greater than 1.5 km. The dendrites appeared to be dominant in the condition of cloud top temperature specifically ranging $-12{\sim}-16^{\circ}C$. However, the association of snow crystal habits with temperature and super-saturation in the cloud could not be examined in the current study. Better understandings of characteristics of snow crystal habits would contribute to preventing breakdown accidents such as a greenhouse destruction and collapse of a temporary building due to heavy snowfall, and traffic accidents due to snow-slippery road condition, providing a higher-level weather information of snow quality for skiers participating in the winter sports, and estimating more accurate snowfall amount, location, and duration with the fallspeed of solid precipitation.

• Atmosphere
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.311-324
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• 2019

We employed a Multi-Angle Snowflake Camera (MASC) to quantitatively analyze snow particles at the ground level in the Yeongdong region of Korea. The MASC captures high-resolution photographs of hydrometeors from three angles and simultaneously measures fallspeed. Based on snowflake images of the several episodes in 2017 and 2018, we derived statistics of size, aspect ratio, orientation, complexity, and fallspeed of snow crystals, which generally showed similar characteristics to the previous studies in other regions of the world. Dominant snow crystal habits of January 22, 2018 generated by northerly were melted aggregates when 850 hPa temperature was about $-6{\sim}-8^{\circ}C$. Average fallspeed of snow crystals was $1.0m\;s^{-1}$ though its size gradually increased as temperature decreased. Another snowfall event (March 8, 2018) was driven by the baroclinic instability as accompanied with a deep trough. Snow crystal habits were largely rimed aggregates (complexity ~1.8) and melting particles of dark images. Meanwhile, in the extreme snowfall event whose snow rate was greater than $10cm\;hr^{-1}$ on January 20, 2017, main snow crystals appeared to be heavily rimed particles with relatively smaller size when convective clouds developed vertically up to 9 km in association with tropopause folding. MASC also could successfully measure a decrease in snow crystal size and an increase in riming degree after AgI seeding at Daegwallyeong on March 14, 2017.