Acknowledgements

This research was performed under NASA contracts NNH14CK40C and NNH14CK39C. The authors would like to thank Dr. Thomas Wagner and Dr. David Considine for their support and encouragement. The CALIPSO data used in this study are the https://doi.org/10.5067/CALIOP/CALIPSO/CAL\_LID\_L1-STAN-DARD-V4-00\_L1B-004.00 data product obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center. Blowing snow data are available from the author and will soon be made available from the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center. The dropsonde data were provided by NCAR/EOL under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation and are available at https://data.eol.ucar.edu/dataset/221.002. We also acknowledge the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) at Goddard Space Flight Center who supplied the MERRA-2 data.
