Hail is one of the typical manifestations of severe convective weather, characterized by its sudden onset and strong localization. In this study, a compact all-fiber coherent Doppler lidar (CDL) working at the 1.5 μm wavelength is employed to detect a hail event. Combined with ERA5 reanalysis data, Parsivel2, and cloud-type products from the Fengyun satellite, the synoptic background of the hail event was analyzed. Owing to its high-precision spectrum measurement capability, the CDL can effectively separate the multi-component power spectra of precipitation particles. By comparing particle velocity, spectrum width and skewness as characteristic parameters from signal separation across light rain, hail and heavy rain, the distinctive power spectrum characteristics of hail were identified. This study verifies that CDL can provide high-spatiotemporal-resolution data support for the short-term forecasting of hail events.
Wu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.