Ice crystal orientation strongly influences cloud radiative properties and remote sensing retrievals, but long-term, high-resolution quantitative observations remain scarce. This study presents comprehensive case studies and statistical analyses of horizontally oriented ice crystals (HOICs) based on full-year (2022) synergistic observations in Beijing, China, combining a zenith-pointing micropulse lidar, a collocated 15° off-zenith polarization lidar, and a Ka-band cloud Doppler radar. Applying a novel height-resolved classification method based on dual-angle polarization lidars, HOICs are identified with high spatiotemporal resolution. HOICs are found to be common, accounting for 15.0 % of all ice-containing cloud data points annually with a peak of 24.6 % in summer, and showing maximum occurrence at temperatures from −20 to −10 °C. Macroscopically, typical HOIC layers exhibit horizontal extents of 10–100 km and durations of several hours within their optimal formation temperature ranges. Furthermore, the Euclidean-distance analysis between HOICs and past overlying cloud layers reveals a strong linkage of HOIC occurrence to supercooled liquid water clouds (SWCs), being much closer to HOIC events than randomly oriented ice crystals (ROICs). Dynamically, cloud radar observations further reveal that HOICs preferentially occur in stable environments with turbulent eddy dissipation rates below 10−2 m2 s−3 and exhibit lower fall velocities than ROICs. Estimates based on radar-observed vertical velocity indicate typical HOIC equivalent diameters of approximately 1200 µm with Reynolds numbers predominantly below 100. These findings provide key observational constraints for improving ice cloud microphysics and orientation parameterizations in numerical models.

We studied the horizontally oriented ice crystals (HOIC) with the combinational observations of a zenith-pointing and a slant-pointing (with a zenith angle of 15 degrees) polarization lidar in Beijing in 2022. The HOICs account for approximately 7.3 % of total ice-containing clouds. These results have the potential to enhance the parameterization scheme in climate models for this unique form of ice crystals.