The correspondence between five precipitation products, including CMORPH, GPCP-2, TRMM 3B43, GPCC, and ITPCAS, and ground-based measurements of precipitation were evaluated on annual, seasonal, and monthly scales during 2000-2014 in the Qinling-Daba Mountains over China, which is a significant area with vital value of climate and hydrology. Performances of the precipitation products in the rela...

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite carries two instruments to measure precipitation: the TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) and the Precipitation Radar (PR). Examination of instantaneous orbit data from TMI and PR reveals several problems in the TRMM products that are not readily discernible from monthly or areal averaged data sets. TMI rainfall processing algorithms yield signif...

[1] The structure of tropical large-scale vertical velocity from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Re-Analysis is compared with simultaneous satellite measurements of precipitation, top of atmosphere radiation, and clouds from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) on timescales ranging from hours to months. The first two empirical orthogonal functions of the vertic...

Observational and modeling studies have revealed the relationships between convective–stratiform rain proportion and the vertical distributions of vertical motion, latent heating, and moistening in mesoscale convective systems. Therefore, remote sensing techniques that can be used to quantify the area coverage of convective or stratiform rainfall could provide useful information regarding the d...

Satellite remote sensing is an indispensable means of measuring and monitoring precipitation on a global scale. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) is continuing to make significant progress in helping the global features of precipitation to be understood, particularly with the help of a pair of spaceborne microwave sensors, the TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) and precipitation radar (PR...

Several methods have been proposed to train microwave radiometers to retrieve precipitation rates estimated by a radar which observed the same location at the same time. These radar-trained passive-microwave algorithms differ in the quantities that are estimated: some estimate the vertically-integrated liquid water, while others estimate the near-surface precipitation. Since it is no more or le...

Effects of aerosol radiative forcing on the diurnal and seasonal cycles of precipitation over West Africa and eastern Atlantic Ocean are investigated for the boreal summer season: June–July–August. An eight year (2000–2007) average of GCM simulated rainfall data is compared with the corresponding TRMM rainfall data. The comparison shows that the amplitude of the diurnal cycles of rainfall over ...

How much precipitation is contributed by warm rain systems over the tropics? What is the typical size, intensity, and echo top of warm rain events observed by the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Precipitation Radar over different regions of the tropics? What proportion of warm raining areas is actually attached to the edges of cold systems? Are there mesoscale warm raining systems, a...

This study focuses on improving the retrieval of rain from measured microwave brightness temperatures and the capability of the retrieved field to represent the mesoscale structure of a small intense hurricane. For this study, a database is constructed from collocated Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) precipitation radar (PR) and the TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) data resulting in about ...

P recipitation, in driving the global hydrological cycle, strongly influences the behavior of the Earth’s weather and climate systems and is central to their variability. Two-thirds of the global rainfall occurs over the Tropics,1 which leads to its profound effect on the general circulation of the atmosphere. This is because its energetic equivalent, latent heating (LH), is the tropical convec...