Raindrop Size Distribution Over Northeastern Coast of Brazil

1. INTRODUCTION The granularity of raindrops within a rain volume has been the focus of recent research projects such as the ones dealing with numerical simulation of pollutants scavenging and radar microwave electromagnetic energy dispersion by rainfall, represented by radar reflectivity factor. The raindrop size distribution (RSD) characteristics depend on the microphysical, dynamical and kinetic processes that interact to produce rain. They are the basis for the definition and computation of the major part of parameters involved in microwave propagation within clouds and rain. That is why many researchers, e. made efforts to understanding and modeling the raindrops size distribution. In general, RSD is given by a function N(D) that depends on the drop diameter (D) for a certain air volume. Functions with 2 or 3 parameters are employed for the statistics of such distributions. In this work, an exponential and a lognormal distributions were used to fit the RSD.