Principal-component analysis for raindrops and its application to the remote sensing of rain

摘要

In the problem of inverting remote-sensing measurements of rain, current representations of the raindrop size distribution suffer crucially from the expedient but unjustified and empirically ill-fitting assumption that the distribution has a known closed-form shape, whether log-normal or #GAMMA#-distributed. This paper proposes an approach to avoid such unfounded a priori assumptions entirely. The resulting representation of the rain is then used to derive 'forward' formulae for rain remote-sensingalgorithms.