During the winter of 2006-2007, a number of in-situ and remote sensing precipitation measuring devices were operated at the Center of Atmospheric Research Experiment (CARE) site located near Egbert, Ontario about 30 km to the NW of the King City C-band operational dual-polarized radar. While the experiment was originally designed to measure winter precipitation for the Canadian Cloudsat/CALIPSO validation program (C3VP), the NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) ground validation program joined the efforts (cf. Petersen et al., 2007; this conference) bringing optical disdrometers (2D-video and two Parsivel disdrometers) and a multi-frequency radar. The CARE is a well- instrumented facility including Vaisala FD12P visibility sensor, Precipitation Occurrence Sensor System (POSS), the McGill University’s vertically-pointing X- band Doppler, and Hydrometeor Velocity and Shape Detector (HVSD).

In this paper we focus on two case studies, (a) the 6 December 2006 and (b) the 22 January 2007 snow events. Our objectives are six-fold, (a) to determine the characteriscs of snow size spectra, (b) to determine the bulk density of snow by comparing measurements of Parsivel and FD12P, (c) to estimate a density (ρ) versus ‘size’ relation for snow by comparing the 2D-video derived Zh measurements with the well-calibrated King City Zh data, (d) to compare the Zh between 2D-video, POSS and King City radars, (e) to estimate snowfall rate (SR) and equivalent melt water (MWR) rate, including comparison of melt water accumulations from 2D-video, POSS, and other ground-based instruments at the CARE site, and (f) to derive the Zh-SR and Zh-MWR power law relations from 2D-video and Parsivel data.