Meteorological Verification in the Biases Between TMI and Kwajalein Rain Rates

The Goddard Profiling Algorithm represents a Bayesian algorithm to retrieve rainfall and its vertical structure from passive microwave radiometers. It uses an a-priori database of cloud structures and its associated brightness temperature based upon TMRM Microwave Imager (TMI) and Precipitation Radar (PR) (Kummerow, et. al. 2011). The rain rate amounts calculated from 12 years worth of TMI data were compared against the Kwajalein radar for quality assessment. An average rain rate scatterplot was created based on the TMI and Kwajalein observations as the TMI passes over Kwajalein. The biased points from the scatterplot were examined from global scale meteorlogical parameters to micro scale meteorological parameters. The examination used the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) data to obtain the meteorological parameters. Based on the different meteorological conditions, the rainfall retrieval should be adjusted to better estimate rain rates for the TMI.