LOW RESOLUTION RAINFALL ESTIMATIONS FROM PASSIVE MICROWAVE RADIOMETERS

Analyses of Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) microwave radiometer (TMI) and precipitation radar (PR) data show that the rainfall inhomogeneity, represented by the coefficient of variation, decreases as rain rate increases at the low resolution (the footprint size of TMI 10 GHz channel). The rainfall inhomogeneity, however, is relatively constant for all rain rates at the high resolution (the footprint size of TMI 37 GHz channel). Consequently, radiometric signatures at lower spatial resolutions are characterized by larger dynamic range and smaller variability than those at higher spatial resolution. Based on the observed characteristics, this study develops a low-resolution (${\sim}40{\times}40$ km) rainfall retrieval algorithm utilizing realistic rainfall distributions in the a-priori databases. The purpose of the low-resolution rainfall algorithm is to make more reliable climatological rainfalls from various microwave sensors, including low-resolution radiometers.