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Comparison of CloudSat and TRMM radar reflectivities

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Comparison of reflectivity data of radars onboard CloudSat and TRMM is performed using coincident overpasses. The contoured frequency by altitude diagrams (CFADs) are constructed for two cases: (a) only include collocated vertical profiles that are most likely to be raining and (b) include all collocated profiles along with cloudy pixels falling within a distance of about 50 km from the centre point of coincidence. Our analysis shows that for both cases, CloudSat underestimates the radar reflectivity by about 10 dBZ compared to that of TRMM radar below 15 km altitude. The difference is well outside the uncertainty value of ~2 dBZ of each radar. Further, CloudSat reflectivity shows a decreasing trend while that of TRMM radar an increasing trend below 4 km height. Basically W-band radar that CloudSat flies suffers strong attenuation in precipitating clouds and its reflectivity value rarely exceeds 20 dBZ though its technical specification indicates the upper measurement limit to be 40 dBZ. TRMM radar, on the other hand, cannot measure values below 17 dBZ. In fact combining data from these two radars seems to give a better overall spatial structure of convective clouds.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to CloudSat team, NASA and CloudSat Data Processing Center, NASA for providing the 2D-CloudSat-TRMM product. This work was partially supported by a grant from the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. India New Delhi.

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  1. Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560 012, India

    K D SINDHU & G S BHAT

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SINDHU, K.D., BHAT, G.S. Comparison of CloudSat and TRMM radar reflectivities. J Earth Syst Sci 122, 947–956 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-013-0316-9

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