Improving mid to high latitude passive microwave retrievals and simulations of precipitation using aircraft based doppler radar data

Precipitating cloud systems exhibit a wide variety of microphysical and spatial structures of relevance to microwave remote sensing of surface precipitation rate. These properties remain poorly documented on a global basis, especially in cold-season midlatitude and high-latitude situations.

This paper describes efforts to assess and improve the accuracy of microphysical assumptions used in satellite passive microwave radiative transfer models and retrieval algorithms by exploiting complementary observations from satellite radiometers, such as AMSR, and coincident aircraft instruments, such as the APR-2 or EDOP Doppler radars.

We focus in particular on data from the Wakasa Bay field experiment, Japan 2003, pertaining to surface snowfall events. The observations of vertical profiles of reflectivity and Doppler-derived fallspeeds are used in conjunction with the radiometric measurements to identify 1-D profiles of cloud hydrometeor types, sizes, and concentrations that are consistent with the observations.