Z-R relationship and a severe rainfall observed by C-band radar in eastern coast of northeastern Brazil

The development and application of techniques that allow to study and to understand the features of precipitations from remote sensing data have been an important object in a number of research. In the radar applications, a basic relation between the reflectivity of the radar and the rain rate must be defined for the region to be studied, that is the conversion of the radar reflectivity in rain rate through a Z-R relationship with two coefficients. One another method used for the estimation of the relation between the radar reflectivity and the rain rate, is a set of the drop number measured with the disdrometer (Joss and Waldvogel, 1969; Campistron et al., 1987). The estimation of Z-R relation will be discussed for each type of rain (convective and stratiform).