RESEARCH ON MOIST SYMMETRIC INSTABILITY IN A STRONG SNOWFALL IN NORTH CHINA^*

The concept of wet bulb potential vorticity and SCAPE(slantwise convective available potential energy) is used to calculate the horizontal and vertical distribution of moist symmetric instability including convective symmetric instability(CSI) and local symmetric instability(LSI) in the process of a storm snowfall in North China.The potential contribution of moist symmetric instability to a narrow storm snowfall belt occurring in the Hetao and Lindong,Linxi region of Inner Mongolia and the relationship between moist symmetric instability and direction of the basic flow,wind shear and moisture are discussed.It is found that the strong snowfall belt is almost parallel with negative value area of wet bulb potential vorticity at low levels in the vicinity of snow area.And the dynamical mechanism of the strong snowfall center in the Lindong,Linxi region is different from that in the Hetao region.The former is induced by frontogenetical forcing with weak symmetric instability in the warm section of frontal area and the latter triggered by obvious moist symmetric instability.