Discoveries About Tropical Cyclones Provided by Microwave Remote Sensing

摘要

Since the first "Oceans from Space" meeting in Venice, in the spring of 1980, microwave remote sensing of storms over the oceans has developed in numerous ways. The first seeds to use microwave passive and active instruments were sown with the SEASAT satellite launched in 1978 (see e.g. Katsaros and Brown, 1991). It carried the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SSMR), the SEASAT scatterometer, an altimeter, and a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). I review below how these types of instruments in their later incarnations have contributed to our understanding of tropical cyclones, also known as hurricanes and typhoons and by other names in different ocean basins. In addition to the four types of SEASAT instruments, since 1998 we have had the rain radar on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM; see Simpson et al., 1988; Kummerow et al., 2000), which has added a new whole dimension to observing precipitation in these storms. In Section 4.2, I give a short synopsis and examples of how each of these instrument types have benefited Tropical Cyclones (TC) research and provided practical appli-cations. Often, employing data from more than one sensor contributes to interpretat-ing the information inherent in each of them. I have not attempted to review the use of microwave sounders. In Section 4.3, I shall present some thoughts on how these advances can be amplified in the near future. Section 4.4 gives some conclusions.