Rainfall products from radar, satellite, rain gauges, and combinations have been evaluated for a season of record rainfall in a heavily instrumented study domain in Oklahoma. Algorithm performance is evaluated in terms of spatial scale, temporal scale, and rainfall intensity. Results from this study will help users of rainfall products to understand their errors. Moreover, it is intended that d...

Tropical cyclones (TCs) that landfall over Madagascar and Mozambique can cause flooding endangers lives. To better understand how environmental conditions affect the rain fields of these TCs, this study utilized spatial metrics to analyze two storms taking similar paths months apart. Using a geographic information system, rates 1 mm/h were extracted from satellite-based dataset contoured define...

A rain field reconstruction and downscaling methodology is presented, which allows suitable integration of large scale rainfall information and rain-gauge measurements at the ground. The former data set is assumed to provide probabilistic indicators that are used to infer the parameters of the probability density function of the stochastic rain process at each pixel site. Rain-gauge measurement...

This study evaluated the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Global Forecast System (GFS) forecast bias in different precipitation (light rain, moderate rain, heavy rain and very heavy rain) by comparing the ground-based observations in three countries. Then the correlations between GFS precipitation forecast errors and the aerosol loading are investigated extensively to examin...

[1] Warm rain occurs in low‐level liquid water clouds and does not involve an ice‐phase process. Comprising many state‐of‐the‐art passive and active instruments, the NASA A‐Train series of satellites provide comprehensive simultaneous information about warm clouds and their precipitation processes. This study exploits multi‐sensor data from the A‐Train satellite constellation to investigate the...

Measurements of sea surface temperature (SST) can be made by satellite microwave radiometry in all weather conditions except rain. Microwaves penetrate clouds with little attenuation, giving an uninterrupted view of the ocean surface. This is a distinct advantage over infrared measurements of SST, which are obstructed by clouds. Comparisons with ocean buoys show a root mean square difference of...

This paper presents an implementation of an IIMMW simulator for use in developing a multisensory fusion methodology for Helicopter DNAW operations. The functional modeling approach based on power representation of the simulated sensors is adopted in the simulation. The detailed power and attenuation models are described and the received power from the target and background is converted into int...

We used airborne imaging spectroscopy and photon transport modeling to determine how biological invasion altered the chemistry of forest canopies across a Hawaiian montane rain forest landscape. The nitrogen-fixing tree Myrica faya doubled canopy nitrogen concentrations and water content as it replaced native forest, whereas the understory herb Hedychium gardnerianum reduced nitrogen concentrat...

Evidence is building that human-induced climate change— or global warming—has a direct influence on changes in precipitation and the hydrological cycle. While precipitation amount is most commonly considered, even bigger changes occur in its intensity, frequency and type (rain vs. snow). A warmer climate increases risks of both drought and flood, but at different times and/or places. These aspe...

Microwave brightness temperatures are obtained from the SeaWinds scatterometer on the QuikSCAT satellite. These QuikSCAT Radiometer (QRad) measurements are used to infer instantaneous oceanic rain rates using a statistical retrieval algorithm that is based upon collocated TMI measurements. QRad instantaneous rain rate measurements have been binned in 0.5 hour local time windows onto a 0.5° x 0....