11th Conference on Satellite Meteorology and Oceanography

Tuesday, 16 October 2001
Improvements to the experimental Tropical Rainfall Potential (TRaP) technique
Stanley Q. Kidder, CIRA/Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins, CO; and S. J. Kusselson, J. A. Knaff, and R. J. Kuligowski
Poster PDF (150.3 kB)
The experimental TRaP technique uses satellite estimates of instantaneous rain rate in tropical cyclones and track forecasts of the storms to produce forecasts of 6 to 24 hour rainfall amounts. The technique was applied in real time in 2000 using rain rates from the first National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit-A (NOAA-15 AMSU-A) and from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I). Improvements to the technique include (1) the addition of a satellite (NOAA-16), which will increase the number of storm observations; (2) the use of 16 km resolution AMSU-B rain rate estimates instead of the 48 km resolution AMSU-A rain estimates, and (3) nearly world-wide storm monitoring instead of only Atlantic and eastern Pacific storm monitoring. The improved TRaP technique will be tested in real time during 2001 and the results will be reported at the conference.

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