Ice and snow particles have a great, yet poorly understood impact on the Earth's climate system. One of the difficulties of studying snow particles is their irregular shape. While spheres and even oblate spheroids backscatter radiation in a consistent manner, irregularly shaped objects do not. Due to the complexities of snowflakes, they are often assumed to be spherical for both satellite retrieval and modeling purposes. This can introduce error in many studies. While there are several aggregate snowflake models in existence, many use spheres as a building block for the snowflake. This is inaccurate as most snowflakes are comprised of a combination of bullet rosettes, plates, columns, and dendritic snow crystals. Furthermore, most studies do not have constraints in place to make sure that snowflakes are of the correct size and density as observed from field studies. None of the theoretical models examined in this study analyze the single-scattering properties of the flakes. In order to improve upon previous models, this study creates an aggregate snowflake using 200 ìm and 400 ìm 6-bullet rosette crystals. These crystals and resultant flakes are required to follow established size-density relationships obtained from numerous field studies. In addition, the flakes must also be of similar fractal dimension determined from other case studies. The single-scattering properties of these flakes are then determined from the discrete dipole approximation. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Meteorology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Summer Semester, 2010. / April 13, 2010. / dda, Extinction Coefficient, Scattering Coefficient, Absorption Coefficient / Includes bibliographical references. / Guosheng Liu, Professor Directing Thesis; Robert G. Ellingson, Committee Member; Paul Ruscher, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_180792 |
| Contributors | Nowell, Holly Kreutzer (authoraut), Liu, Guosheng (professor directing thesis), Ellingson, Robert G. (committee member), Ruscher, Paul (committee member), Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences (degree granting department), Florida State University (degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Florida State University, Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text |
| Format | 1 online resource, computer, application/pdf |
| Rights | This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). The copyright in theses and dissertations completed at Florida State University is held by the students who author them. |
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