The Owase area is well known to Japanese meteorologists as the heaviest rainfall region in this country. The Owase weather station recorded a maximum annual rainfall over 6,000 mm and a maximum daily rainfall over 400 mm. Nevertheless, it was pointed out by the weather radar meteorologists at Nagoya that the radar 142 km apart from Owase is unable to show the heaviness of the Owase rain. This suggests that either the height of the rainclouds are so low that the radar beam misses them or the raindrop spectra have particular characteristics.
Therefore, m a ny cloud physicists has been interested in the rain mechanism at Owase. The present field investigation was planned primarily to provide data for giving an answer to the question raised in radar utilization. The instruments used were two x-band radars, a vertically pointing Doppler radar and a short range RHI radar, and auxiliary ground instruments such as a raindrop recorder and raingauges. The data collections made successfully during the operational period were for the typhoon rainband on 30th to 31st Aug. and for showers developed along a stationary front on 16th to 21st, Sept.1971. The present paper mainly describes the case study on the latter shower, though it was not a case of heaviest rain typical of the area. This paper is also composed of two main parts: the first part, Section 2 through 6, aims to construct the cloud structure, and the second part, Sections 7 through 10, deduces a probable precipitation mechanism which is capable of generating rainfall of reasonable intensity.
A quasi-statio n ary front moving slowly eastwards existed during the period from 16th to 18th, Sept. as shown in Fig.1. Radar observation was made on the showers which had been developing along the stationary front around the Kii-peninsula, Honshu, Japan.
The Doppler radar data of height-time section and the RHI echo video of three dimensions are as shown in Figs.3,4 and 6a, and they were compared with the PPI gain step echoes of the Nagoya radar which is shown in Fig.2a. Thus the three-dimensional structures of the elementary convective cloud and their complex echoes were constructed as shown schematically in Figs.5b and 6b. Each convective cloud is consisted with a tower part and the precipitation streak from the tower which spread out at the surface. The two parts, the tower and the precipitation streak, are also exhibited primarily in Figs.3 and 4. The shower complex was composed of such convective clouds whose towers were horizontally spaced by several to ten kilometer intervals, as revealed in Fig.2a.
The Doppler radar also provides the vertical distr i butions of up- and down-drafts within the rainclouds, as given in Figs.7 to 9. Especially in the present case, considerably steady updrafts about 1 m/s on average (2-3 m/s in the maximum) have been found within the low level streaks, as shown by the second mode in Fig.9. The low level cloud thus involving a relatively steady updraft is noticed to play a significant role in the development of heavy rain. As the generated raindrops fall from the tower cloud into the low cloud in a seeding style, they develop in the form of a trapezoidal spectrum as shown schematically in Fig.14. Analyses of the observed raindrop spectra show that a rapid increase in the rainfall rate is associated with increase mainly in concentration of raindrops rather than in the spectral width until the rate reaches a certain characteristic magnitude, say 9 mm/hr in the present case, but after that the rainfall increase is associated with increase mainly in the spectral width, i. e. Dm, rather than in concentration. The latter growth pattern of the above, which is specified in the present case as “trapezoidal growth of raindrop spectrum”, is considered to occur in relation with the double layer structure of raincloud as revealed in Fig.9and by echo analysis.
Under the assumption of this drop growth mechanism,
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