Precipitation events were examined at Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories, Canada, during the autumn and winter of 1998 and during the spring of 1999 with a variety of observational tools, including a polarimetric radar. This location is characterized by a relatively small amount of precipitation (annual average of 450 mm), with approximately half being in the form of snow. During the observational periods, precipitation was produced within multilayered cloud systems with heights ranging up to 10 km, and instances of light snow were associated with either low (<2.5 km) or high (up to 10 km) clouds. Precipitation over the observational periods was typically produced in banded structures, was sometimes reduced because of subcloud evaporation or sublimation, and in the winter was often in the form of individual crystals. A state-of-the-art weather forecasting model was often poor at simulating some of the critical features of the precipitation events, such as cloud top height and precipitation amount. In addition, it was shown that with the sensitive CloudSat radar, ~17% of overpasses will be associated with the occurrence of detectable precipitation at Fort Simpson, but with the less sensitive Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) radar, much of the precipitation will be undetected.