Effectively monitoring precipitation in the western United States is of particular interest to the hydrological and meteorological communities. In the West, a majority of the annual precipitation often falls over a brief, but crucial, period of time. This rainfall and snowfall must be carefully managed in order to provide sufficient water and power to the quickly growing cities and agricultural communities throughout the entire year. Hydrologic modeling has become an integral component in dam, reservoir and canal management. Today, these models have begun to utilize WSR-88D precipitation estimates in order to predict streamflow from a given watershed. A need to improve precipitation estimates in mountainous terrain exists and is currently being addressed.
Several problems associated with precipitation monitoring by WSR-88D radar have been recognized and documented by many. The complex terrain of the West complicates this further where radar coverages are limited by intervening mountains. Many of these shielded regions, however, are quite visible from another radar’s perspective. By utilizing radar data from 2 sources, some of the discrepancies between the radar precipitation estimates and the rain gauges may be reduced. Furthermore, by incorporating a vertical profile of reflectivity, the range-dependency of the precipitation estimates may be mitigated. Finally, a method will be presented which shows how correlations between cloud top temperatures and vertical reflectivity structures are utilized in order to improve precipitation monitoring. Improvements made in basin-wide precipitation estimates will have a direct feedback on streamflow prediction models.