ESTIMATION OF AREA-AVERAGED RAINFALL OVER TROPICAL OCEANS FROM MICROWAVE RADIOMETRY - A SINGLE CHANNEL APPROACH Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • The algorithm was tested by using the Nimbus-5 Electrically Scanning Microwave Radiometer (ESMR-5) and a simple microwave radiative transfer model to retrieve seasonal 5 5 area averaged rainrate over the tropical Atlantic and Pacific. The brightness temperatures were collected and analyzed into histograms for each season and in each grid box. The histograms suggest a normal distribution of background noise plus a skewed rain distribution at the higher brightness temperatures. By using a statistical estimation procedure based upon normally distributed background noise, the rain distribution was separated from the raw histogram. The radiative transfer model was applied to the rain-only distribution to retrieve area-time averaged rainrates throughout the tropics. An adjustment for the beam filling error was incorporated in the procedure. -from Authors

published proceedings

  • JOURNAL OF APPLIED METEOROLOGY

author list (cited authors)

  • SHIN, K. S., RIBA, P. E., & NORTH, G. R.

citation count

  • 10

complete list of authors

  • SHIN, KS||RIBA, PE||NORTH, GR

publication date

  • October 1990