An algorithm for retrieval of precipitation using microwave humidity sounder channels around 183 GHz

Abstract

An algorithm is developed to identify precipitation affected pixels and quantitatively measure the precipitation using Megha-Tropiques humidity sounder (SAPHIR) channels around water vapor absorption line at 183 GHz. Based on observed brightness temperatures at all the six channels of the SAPHIR, a probabilistic rain identification algorithm is proposed. The rain thus identified is subjected to intensive testing using SAPHIR and PR collocated dataset, that showed that false alarm and missing rain is below 0.9 mm/h. Further a radiative transfer simulations supported rain retrieval algorithm is developed that explained a correlation of 0.7 and rmse of 0.81 mm/h. When both precipitation detection and retrieval algorithms are applied the correlation marginally deteriorates but rmse reduces to 0.55 mm/h. Further comparisons are made of monthly, daily and instantaneous rain over different geographical regions from SAPHIR with corresponding rain values from GSMap, TRMM-3B42 V7 and TRMM-TMI/PR, etc. The paper provides details of algorithm development and validation results.