Precipitation observations near 54 and 183 GHz using the NOAA-15 satellite

Promising agreement over land and sea has been obtained between NEXRAD 3-GHz radar observations of precipitation rate and retrievals based on simultaneous passive observations at 50–191 GHz from the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) on the NOAA-15 meteorological satellite. A neural network with three hidden nodes and one linear output node operated on 15 km resolution data at 183 1 and 183 7 GHz, plus the cosine of scan angle, to produce estimates that match well the morphology of NEXRAD hurricane and frontal precipitation data smoothed to 15-km resolution. A second neural network operated on the same three parameters used in the first network, but smoothed to 50-km resolution, plus spatially-filtered cold perturbations detected in three AMSU tropospheric temperature-sounding channels (channels 4–6), which also have 50-km resolution. Comparison with the same NEXRAD data smoothed to 50-km resolution yielded root mean square (rms) discrepancies for two frontal systems and two passes over Hurricane Georges of 1.1 mm/h, and 1.4 dB for those precipitation events over 4 mm/h. Only 8.9% of the total AMSU-derived rainfall was in areas where AMSU saw more than 1mm/h and NEXRAD saw less than 1-mm/h, and only 6.2% of the total NEXRAD-derived rainfall was in areas where NEXRAD saw more than 1-mm/h and AMSU saw less than 1-mm/h.