CONDITIONS FOR FREEZING PRECIPITATION AT RUSSIAN AND CIS AIRPORTS. II. THE AIRPORT OF MINERALNYE VODY

N. P. Shakina, E. N. Skriptunova, and A. R. Ivanova

Hourly surface observations, radiosonde data, and objective analyses of the meteorological fields for 1986—1995 are used to study meteorological conditions associated with freezing rain and freezing drizzle occurrence at the Mineralnye Vody airport. The cloud top is estimated from the radiosonde data. It is shown that the conditions of freezing precipitation in Mineralnye Vody have some features different from those described in [10] for the Moscow airports. The most important of them are the generally higher occurrence frequency of freezing precipitation, especially of drizzle; a higher occurrence frequency of freezing drizzle from stratiform clouds above which lie warm and dry layers; a higher occurrence frequency of the low-level jet streams, especially within the cloudy layers under winds with the east component in the lower troposphere; and increased and decreased occurrence frequencies of anticyclonic fields of surface pressure and of atmospheric fronts, respectively. Conditions for the classical mechanism of freezing precipitation formation are quite rare in Mineralnye Vody; cases of freezing precipitation from cold clouds dominate.