Convective and stratiform rainfall characteristics from ground-based observations

This study investigates precipitation observed by collocated ground-based instruments at the rooftop observatory in Zhuhai, a coastal city located at the southern tip of the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong Province in South China. Two-year ground-based observations collected from a tipping-bucket rain gauge (RG), two laser disdrometers (PARSIVEL and Present Weather Sensor 100 (PWS)), and a vertically pointing Doppler Micro Rain Radar-2 (MRR), are analyzed in this study. The precipitation from January 2022 to December 2023 is classified into convective, stratiform, and undetermined rainfall categories with the PARSIVEL observations. Statistics are conducted to provide an overview of the rainfall at the coastal city after quality control. An insight into raindrop size distributions indicates that under stratiform rainfall events, measurement discrepancies between the observation instruments can be alleviated, and good consistency are found for the collocated deployment which mitigates uncertainties originating from spatial/temporal variabilities. The rainfall microphysics for convective and stratiform events are further characterized with the two-year dataset.