The authors evaluated several land surface variables from the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) product that are important for global ecological and hydrological studies, including daily maximum (Lnax) and minimum (Lnin) surface air temperatures, atmosphere vapor pressure deficit (VPD), incident solar radiation (SWrad), and surface soil moisture. The M ERRA...

A better understanding of global climate calls for more accurate estimates of liquid and ice water content profiles of precipitating clouds and their associated latent heating profiles. Convective and stratiform precipitation regimes have different latent heating and therefore impact the earth’s climate differently. Classification of clouds over oceans has traditionally been part of more genera...

An evaluation of the version-5 precipitation radar (PR; algorithm 2A25) and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI; algorithm 2A12) rainfall products is performed across the Tropics in two ways: 1) by comparing long-term TRMM rainfall products with Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) global rain gauge analyses and 2) by comparing the rainfall estimates from ...

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite has been in operation for more than 7 years and providing distribution of rainfall throughout the Tropics using microwave observation from the Precipitation Radar (PR) and the TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI). PR, the first space-borne precipitation radar, provides height information based upon the time delay of the precipitation-backscattered...

A method using a nonlinear auto-regressive neural network with exogenous input (NARXnn) to retrieve time series soil moisture (SM) that is spatially and temporally continuous and high quality over the Heihe River Basin (HRB) in China was investigated in this study. The input training data consisted of the X-band dual polarization brightness temperature (TB) and the Ka-band V polarization TB fro...

An evaluation of the Biosphere±Atmosphere Transfer Scheme (BATS) snow submodel was conducted, both in a stand-alone mode and within the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Climate Model version 3 (CCM3). We evaluated, in the stand-alone mode, the performance of BATS parameterizations at local scales using ground-based observations from the former Soviet Union and fromMammo...

Retrievals of falling snow from space represent one of the next important challenges for the atmospheric, hydrological, and energy budget scientific communities. Estimates of falling snow must be captured to obtain the true global precipitation water cycle, snowfall accumulations are required for hydrological studies, and without knowledge of the frozen particles in clouds one cannot adequately...