This paper describes improvements to the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI) land rainfall algorithm in version 7 (v7) of the TRMM data products. The correlations between rain rates and TMI 85-GHz brightness temperatures (Tb) for convective and stratiform rain are generated using 7 years of collocated TMI and TRMM precipitation radar (PR) data. The TMI algorithm ...

This study quantitatively estimated the precipitation associated with a typhoon in the northwestern Pacific Ocean by using a physical algorithm which included the Weather Research and Forecasting model, Radiative Transfer for TIROS Operational Vertical Sounder model, and data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM)/TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) and TRMM/Precipitation Radar (PR). First...

Remote sensing allows for the continuous and repetitive measurement of rainfall values. Satellite rainfall products such as Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) 3B42 and the Hydroestimator (Hydroe) can be potential sources of data for hydrologic applications, mainly in areas with irregular and sparse spatial distributions of traditional rain gauge stations. However, the accuracy of thes...

The Mekong River is the most important river in Southeast Asia. It has increasingly suffered from water-related problems due to economic development, population growth and climate change in the surrounding areas. In this study, we built a distributed Geomorphology-Based Hydrological Model (GBHM) of the Mekong River using remote sensing data and other publicly available data. Two numerical exper...

Soil erosion is a global issue that threatens food security and causes environmental degradation. Management of water erosion requires accurate estimates of the spatial and temporal variations in the erosive power of rainfall (erosivity). Rainfall erosivity can be estimated from rain gauge stations and satellites. However, the time series rainfall data that has a high temporal resolution are of...

Spaceborne inferences of cloud microstructure and precipitation-forming processes with height have been used to investigate the effect of ingested aerosols on clouds and to integrate the findings with past cloud physics research. The inferences were made with a method that analyzes data from NOAA/AVHRR and TRMM/VIRS sensors to determine the effective radius of cloud particles with height. In ad...

Using FORTE photodiode detector (PDD) observations of lightning, we have determined the geographic distribution of nighttime flash rate density. We estimate the PDD flash detection efficiency to be 62% for total lightning through comparison to lightning observations by the TRMM satellite’s Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS), using cases in which FORTE and TRMM viewed the same storm. We present here...

Satellite systems such as the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) are complex and rely on the proper design and functioning of each of its many subsystems—satellite vehicle, ground validation (GV) sites, precipitation radar (PR), calibration, and retrieval algorithms—to ensure high quality data products. The retrieval algorithms employed in TRMM are based on mathematical models and assum...