Exam 7: Precipitation

Bacteria in decaying plant leaf material can act as ice nuclei.

List and describe three ways in which ice crystals can form in a cloud.

Precipitation with the greatest size (diameter)is ____.

Suppose you wanted to escape from a thief who cannot see, and you are running in the snow. Is your escape more likely at -5 degrees Celsius, or at -15 degrees Celsius?

List the common precipitation gauges that measure rain and snow, and explain their principles.

If you observe large raindrops hitting the ground, you could probably say that the cloud overhead was ____ and had ____ updrafts.

The speed of falling cloud droplet increases until the air resistance ____.

Some of the first experiments in cloud seeding were conducted by Vincent Schaefer and Irving Langmuir during the late 1940s. To seed a cloud, they dropped crushed pellets of ____ from a plane.

In a cloud over land, where the air temperature is -10 degrees Celsius, we would find many more cloud droplets than ice crystals.

With a Doppler radar smaller targets require detection by longer wavelengths.

In the winter you read in the newspaper that a large section of the Midwest is without power due to downed power lines. Which form of precipitation would most likely produce this situation?

In a typical advancing winter storm, which of the following sequences of precipitation types is most likely to occur?

The Doppler radar has the capacity to measure the speed at which falling rain is moving horizontally toward or away from the radar antenna. Falling rain moves with the wind. Consequently, Doppler radar allows scientists to peer into a tornado-generating thunderstorm and observe its wind.

Rain which falls from a cloud but evaporates before reaching the ground is referred to as ____.

In dry powdery snow, the water equivalent ratio may be as high as ____.

Typical cloud droplets seldom reach the ground as rain because they ____________________ before reaching the ground.

After a snowstorm, the newspaper reports that Buffalo, New York, received 1.50 inches of precipitation. If we assume an average water equivalent ratio for this snowstorm, then Buffalo received about ____ inches of snow.

A problem with the tipping bucket rain gauge is that during each "tip" it loses some rainfall and, therefore, undermeasures rainfall amounts, especially during heavy downpours.

Fallstreaks most often form with ____.

Dry ice has a temperature of ____.