The scatterometer SeaWinds on QuikSCAT measures ocean winds via the relationship between the wind and the normalized radar backscatter cross-section (σ◦) from the ocean surface. Scattering and attenuation from falling rain droplets along with ocean surface perturbations due to rain change the backscatter signature of the waves induced by near-surface winds. A simple model incorporates the effec...

The campaign to collect rain attenuation data on terrestrial links had commenced in Malaysian tropical climates for almost two decades. The terrestrial data so far collected have been greatly utilized to derive useful statistics for various microwave applications, such as frequency scaling, rain rate conversion factor, 1-min rain rate contour maps, wet antenna losses, and fade slope duration an...

Scatterometer ocean surface winds have been providing very valuable information to researchers and operational weather forecasters for over 10 years. However, the scatterometer wind retrievals are compromised when rain is present. Merely flagging all rain-affected areas removes the most dynamic and interesting areas from the wind analysis. Fortunately, the Advanced Earth Observing Satellite II ...

The "black rain" that fell after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been generally believed to contain radioactive materials. During 1949-1961 the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission conducted surveys that included a query about exposure to the rain that fell a short time after the bombings. This article presents the first report of those data in relation to possible adverse health o...

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...

The frequency distributions of surface rain rate are evaluated in the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) satellite observations and the NOAA/GFDL global atmosphere model version 2 (AM2). Instantaneous satellite rain-rate observations averaged over the 2.5° latitude 2° longitude model grid are shown to be representative of the half-hour rain ra...

Rain cell size is an input requirement for rain-induced attenuation studies. It is useful in estimating the extent of a given radio link path that will traverse the rain medium in a given rain event. The “Synthetic Storm” approach, which requires 1-minute integration time data, is used to derive the proposed rain cell sizes for various climatic zones within South Africa. The conversion of the r...

Propagation measurements at Ku-band over an earth space path have been carried out at Kolkata (22°34’N, 88°29’E) by receiving a signal at 11.172 GHz from the satellite NSS-6 (geostationary at 95°E) since June 2004. The amplitudes of the co-polar signal and the cross-polar component have been monitored along with rain rate and drop size distribution measurements by an optical raingauge and a Jos...

In this paper, we propose an ameliorated physically-based rain rate estimation algorithm for semi-arid regions using the Rayleigh approximation. The proposed algorithm simultaneously uses the reflectivity and the specific differential phase to provide an accurate estimation for both small and large rain rates. In order to validate the proposed estimator, simulated polarimetric rain rate data ba...