Skewness as measure of the invariance of instantaneous renormalized drop diameter distributions – Part 1: Convective vs. stratiform precipitation

Abstract. We investigate the variability of the shape of the renormalized drop diameter instantaneous distribution using of the third order central moment: the skewness. Disdrometer data, collected at Darwin Australia, are considered either as whole or as divided in convective and stratiform precipitation intervals. We show that in all cases the distribution of the skewness is strongly peaked around 0.64. This allows to identify a most common distribution of renormalized drop diameters and two main variations, one with larger and one with smaller skewness. The distributions shapes are independent from the stratiform vs. convective classification.