Characteristics of clouds, precipitation, and latent heat in midlatitude frontal system mixed with dust storm from GPM satellite observations and WRF simulations

A heavy dust storm originating in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia traveled to Northeast China and met a midlatit-ude frontal system on May 3, 2017. The potential ice nuclei (IN) effects of mineral dust aerosols on the vertical structure of clouds, precipitation, and latent heat (LH) were studied using Global Precipitation Mission (GPM) satellite observations and Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model simulations. The WRF simulations correctly captured the main fea-tures of the system, and the surface rain rate distribution was positively correlated with data retrieved from the GPM Mi-crowave Imager. Moreover, the correlation coefficient increased from 0.31 to 0.54 with increasing moving average win-dow size. The WRF-simulated rainfall vertical profiles are generally comparable to the GPM Dual-Frequency Precipita-tion Radar (DPR) observations, particularly in low layers. The joint probability distribution functions of the rain rate at dif-ferent altitudes from the WRF simulation and GPM observations show high positive correlation coefficients of ～0.80, in-dicating that the assumptions regarding the raindrop size distribution in the WRF model and DPR retrieval were consistent. Atmospheric circulation analysis and aerosol optical depth observations from the Himawari-8 satellite indicated that the dust storm entered only a narrow strip of the northwest edge of the frontal precipitation system. The WRF simulations showed that in carefully selected areas of heavy dust, dust can enhance the heterogeneous ice nucleation process and in-crease the cloud ice, snowfall, high-altitude precipitation rate, and LH rate in the upper layers. This effect is significant at temperatures of ?15 °C to ?38 °C and requires dust number concentrations exceeding 106 m?3. It is important to accurately classify the dusty region in this type of case study. In the selected vertical cross section, the WRF-simulated and DPR-retrieved LH have comparable vertical shapes and amplitudes. Both results reflect the structure of the tilted frontal surface, with positive LH above it and negative LH below it. The simulated area-averaged LH profiles show positive heating in the entire column, which is a convective-dominated region, and this feature is not significantly affected by dust. DPR-based LH profiles show stratiform-dominated or convective-dominated shapes, depending on the DPR retrieval product.