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...

In this paper, several attitude estimation designs are developed for the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) spacecraft. A contingency attitude determination mode is required in the event of a primary sensor failure. The final design utilizes a full sixth-order Kalman filter. However, due to initial software concerns, the need to investigate simpler designs was required. The algorithms...

This paper investigates the benefits of integrating coarse resolution satellite-derived precipitation estimates with quasi-point rain gauge data for generating a fine spatial resolution precipitation map product. To integrate the two precipitation data sources, a geostatistical downscaling and integration approach is presented that can account for the differences in spatial resolution between d...

In addition to its obvious use for measurement of rainfall, the Precipitation Radar (PR) is also quite useful for the determination of precipitation physics for the improvement of passive microwave algorithms The knowledge obtained from the radar can then be applied to the interpretation of the TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) over its wider swath, and for that matter, for the interpretation of micr...

In this study, the authors compare six different rainfall datasets for South America with a focus on their representation of extreme rainfall during the monsoon season (December–February): the gauge-calibrated TRMM 3B42 V7 satellite product; the near-real-time TRMM 3B42 V7 RT, the GPCP 18 daily (1DD) V1.2 satellite–gauge combination product, the Interim ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA-Interim) product; ...

A procedure to accurately resample spaceborne and ground-based radar data is described, and then applied to the measurements taken from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Precipitation Radar (PR) and the ground-based Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D or WSR) for the validation of the PR measurements and estimates. Through comparisons with the well-calibrated, non-atte...