This article proposes and presents a novel approach to the characterization of winter precipitation and modeling of radar observables through a synergistic use of advanced optical disdrometers for microphysical and geometrical measurements of ice and snow particles (in particular, a multi-angle snowflake camera—MASC), image processing methodology, advanced method-of-moments scattering computations, and state-of-the-art polarimetric radars. The article also describes the newly built and established MASCRAD (MASC + Radar) in-situ measurement site, under the umbrella of CSU-CHILL Radar, as well as the MASCRAD project and 2014/2015 winter campaign. We apply a visual hull method to reconstruct 3D shapes of ice particles based on high-resolution MASC images, and perform “particle-by-particle” scattering computations to obtain polarimetric radar observables. The article also presents and discusses selected illustrative observation data, results, and analyses for three cases with widely-differing meteorological settings that involve contrasting hydrometeor forms. Illustrative results of scattering calculations based on MASC images captured during these events, in comparison with radar data, as well as selected comparative studies of snow habits from MASC, 2D video-disdrometer, and CHILL radar data, are presented, along with the analysis of microphysical characteristics of particles. In the longer term, this work has potential to significantly improve the radar-based quantitative winter-precipitation estimation.

We examine several different features of DSDs based on data and observations from two mid-latitude coastal locations: (a) the Delmarva peninsula, USA, and (b) Incheon, South Korea. In each case, the full DSD spectra were obtained from two collocated disdrometers. Two events from location (a) and one event from location (b) are presented. For (a), observations and retrievals from NASA’s S-band polarimetric radar are included in the analyses as well as retrieved DSD parameters from the dual-wavelength precipitation radar onboard the Global Precipitation Measurement satellite. For (b), the disdrometer-based DSD data are compared with measurements from another sensor. Our main aim is to examine the underlying shape of the DSDs and their representation by the generalized gamma model.