Abstract
With triple frequency radars becoming more and more popular both at ground-based facilities and on airborne platforms and with the prospect of a space mission with a triple-frequency radar payload on the horizon, triple-frequency radar retrievals are becoming fertile areas of active research. In this chapter the benefits and potentials of a triple-frequency radar approach for retrieving rain and ice microphysics will be discussed first on a theoretical basis and then demonstrated for a stratiform case study extracted from the OLYMPEX field campaign with Ku-Ka-W band radar observations. Challenges and recommendations for future work are included in the chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
In a retrieval study Battaglia et al. (2016a) identified as a rule of thumb the condition that the optical thickness from the radar to the target whose properties must be retrieved should not exceed three units (i.e., a two-way attenuation of less than ∼25 dB). Above such levels, attenuation corrections become prohibitive.
- 3.
Hereafter we use the following convention of effective reflectivity factor:
\( {Z}_{e,\lambda }(r)=\frac{\lambda^4}{\pi^5{\left|K\right|}^2}\eta (r) \)
where η is the radar reflectivity, λ is the radar wavelength and |Κ|2 = 0.93. With this definition small ice particles have the same Ze (e.g., Hogan et al. 2006).
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Acknowledgments
The work done by A. Battaglia was funded by the ESA-project “Multi frequency radar study” while the work by F. Tridon was funded by the ARM-DoE project “Ice Processes in Antarctica: Identification via multi-wavelength active and passive measurements and model evaluation”.The contributions by S. Tanelli and J. Leinonen were carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The work contributed by S. Kneifel was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant KN 1112/2-1 as part of the Emmy-Noether Group OPTIMIce.
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Battaglia, A., Tanelli, S., Tridon, F., Kneifel, S., Leinonen, J., Kollias, P. (2020). Triple-Frequency Radar Retrievals. In: Levizzani, V., Kidd, C., Kirschbaum, D.B., Kummerow, C.D., Nakamura, K., Turk, F.J. (eds) Satellite Precipitation Measurement. Advances in Global Change Research, vol 67. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24568-9_13
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