Bright band observations with radar and aircraft

The melting of ice particles is an important process in midlatitude precipitation systems. The melting layer itself plays a non-negligible role in radar meteorology and hydrology. During the CLEOPATRA (Meischner et al., 1993) field experiment in summer 1992 in Southern Germany several bright band situations in stratiform precipitation were observed. Here we report on the measurements performed on 11 July 1992. Measurements were taken with the DLR C-band polarimetric Doppler radar (Schroth et al., 1988) located at Oberpfaffenhofen scanning in RHI mode, the vertical pointing L-band CW Doppler radar and RASS system of the University of Hamburg (Richter, 1993) located at Penzing, together with the DLR FALCON jet equipped with optical PMS 2D cloud and precipitation probes. The FALCON was flying along the radial from 6690 m down to 1550 m above ground. The 0°C layer was located at about 2400 m above ground. The presented case study shows a unique set of polarimetric radar data and vertical pointing Doppler measurements, collected simultaneously with aircraft in situ measurements in the melting layer.