Effect of the accretion by water drops on the melting of snowflakes

An earlier published relation between melting fraction and the mass of snowflake (Szyrmer and Zawadzki (1999) was investigated but our results showed that the melting fraction hardly depends on the mass of the snowflakes in a relatively wide size range. With relatively modest to high amounts of water present, our results show an even larger spread and discrepancy compared to the previous relationship that used spherical rather than oblate spheroid shaped snow. Finally, precipitation formation of a real case with partial snow melting and particle re-freezing was simulated. The type of the surface precipitation produced by the model agreed well with surface observations, especially compared to a similar bulk microphysics scheme that produced far more freezing rain that contradicted the surface observations.