Abstract
One of the current problems in the accurate estimation of over-ocean wind from scatterometry observations is the proper accounting for precipitation. Specific cases such as hurricanes are particularly difficult, because precipitation in the eye wall and rain bands can be quite heavy, and therefore, affect the scatterometer signatures so drastically that a category-4 hurricane can appear, to the scatterometer, to have category-1 winds. We have developed an approach to infer and account for the signature of the precipitation from non-simultaneous passive-microwave measurements of rain, with the help of geostationary IR measurements. In this note, we describe the basic approach, and the results of applying it to the data taken by the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission Microwave Imager measurements several hours before and after the QuikSCAT observation of Hurricane Rita in September 2005. We also describe how we are enhancing the approach with more realism in the assimilation of the IR information.
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Notes
Backscatter relative to a scatterer that reflects the received power uniformly over 4π steradians, thus in this document σ0 will always be dimensionless.
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This work was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and at Florida State University under National Science Foundation grant number 0533108.
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Fore, A., Haddad, Z.S., Krishnamurti, T.N. et al. Improving Scatterometry Retrievals of Wind in Hurricanes Using Non-Simultaneous Passive Microwave Estimates of Precipitation and a Split-Step Advection/Convection Model. Pure Appl. Geophys. 169, 415–424 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-011-0378-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-011-0378-z