Abstract
In late 1997, the launch of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite marked the beginning of a new era of satellite remote sensing, adding (literally) a new dimension to cloud and precipitation observations from space. TRMM Precipitation Radar (PR) was the first spaceborne weather radar, having provided valuable observations of three-dimensional precipitating cloud structure during its 17-year operation until 2014. A second breakthrough was brought about by the CloudSat W-band radar and the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) lidar, which, although limited to nadir observations unlike PR, have enabled to profile the vertical structure of a broad spectrum of clouds from thin cirrus to deep convection towers. The TRMM PR was succeeded by its follow-on instrument Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR) aboard the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) core observatory with an improved capability to detect light and frozen precipitation. This chapter is dedicated to concise descriptions of the theoretical basis and algorithmic strategies behind radar and lidar observations.
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Notes
- 1.
The spaceborne radars have higher frequencies (Ku, Ka, and W bands), for which the Rayleigh approximation is not always valid. The consequences of this will be discussed later.
- 2.
PSD is better known as the drop size distribution (DSD) when applied to rain.
- 3.
“Radar reflectivity factor” should not be confused with “radar reflectivity”, which nominally refers to the backscattering cross section per unit volume (Sect. 10.1.2). In practice, however, radar reflectivity is very often used as a substitute for radar reflectivity factor.
- 4.
In TRMM and GPM studies, \(Z_{e,m}\) and \(Z_{e,t}\) are often denoted as \(Z_m\) and \(Z_e\), respectively (e.g., Iguchi et al. 2000). In the general literature, \(Z_e\) refers to attenuation-corrected and uncorrected reflectivities without explicit distinction.
- 5.
The linear depolarization ratio (LDR), just as the lidar depolarization ratio (see Sect. 10.3.3), helps differentiate the hydrometeor types from nadir observations.
- 6.
By convention, the backscattering cross section and extinction coefficient are designated by \(\sigma _b\) and k in the radar equation, while by \(\beta \) and \(\alpha \) in the lidar equation. We follow these individual notational conventions in this book.
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Masunaga, H. (2022). Active Remote Sensing. In: Satellite Measurements of Clouds and Precipitation. Springer Remote Sensing/Photogrammetry. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2243-5_10
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