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 ėm and 400 ėm 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.
