Shattering and Particle Interarrival Times Measured by Optical Array Probes in Ice Clouds

Abstract Optical array probes are one of the most important tools for determining the microphysical structure of clouds. It has been known for some time that the shattering of ice crystals on the housing of these probes can lead to incorrect measurements of particle size distributions and subsequently derived microphysical properties if the resulting spurious particles are not rejected. In this paper it is shown that the interarrival times of particles measured by these probes can be bimodal—the “cloud” probes are more affected than the “precipitation” probes. The long interarrival time mode represents real cloud structure while the short interarrival time mode results from fragments of shattered ice particles. It is demonstrated for the flights considered here that if the fragmented particles are filtered using an interarrival time threshold of 2 × 10−4 s in three of the four cases and 1 × 10−5 s in the other, then the measured total concentration can be affected by up to a factor of 4 in situations where large particles are present as determined by the mass-weighted mean size exceeding 1 mm, or the exponential slope parameter falling below 30 cm−1. When the size distribution is narrow (mass weighted mean size 1 mm), ice water contents can be overestimated by 20%–30% for the cases presented here.