Retrieval of Rain-Rate Using the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit(AMSU)

Rain-rate retrieval using the NOAA/AMSU (Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit) (Zaho et al., 2001) has been implemented at METRI/KMA since 2001. Here, we present the results of the AMSU derived rain-rate and validation result, especially for the rainfall associated with the tropical cyclone for 2001. For the validation, we use rain-rate derived from the ground based radar and/or rainfall observation from the rain gauge in Korea. We estimate the bias score, threat score, bias, RMSE and correlation coefficient for total of 16 tropical cyclone cases. Bias score shows around 1.3 and it increases with the increasing threshold value of rain-rate, while the threat score extends from 0.4 to 0.6 with the increasing threshold value of precipitation. The averaged rain-rate for at all 16 cases is 3.96mm/hr and 1.41mm/hr for the retrieved from AMSU and the ground observation, respectively. On the other hand, AMSU rain-rate shows a much better agreement with the ground based observation over inner part of tropical cyclone than over the outer part (Correlation coefficient for convective region is about 0.7, while it is only about 0.3 over the stratiform region). The larger discrepancy of tile correlation coefficient with the different part of the tropical cyclone is partly due to the time difference in between ice water path and surface rainfall. This results indicates that it might be better to develop the algorithm for different rain classes such as convective and stratiform.