Estimating Oceanic Rainfall Using Microwave and GOES Infrared Satellite Data

摘要

Since the mid 1960s, various techniques have been developed to estimate rainfall over land using satellite imagery. Among them, the most widely used is the convective rainfall technique of Scofield and Oliver (1977). The Scofield/Oliver algorithm, and all other algorithms based on visible and infrared satellite imagery, do not measure rainfall directly. One way of avoiding these problems associated with the visible and infrared techniques is to estimate rainfall using observations of radiation in the super high frequency (microwave) region. Wilheit et al. (1977) has addressed the problem of estimating oceanic rainfall using microwave radiation, and an oceanic rainfall atlas was generated using this algorithm. The purpose of this work is to test Wilheit's assumptions and develop an algorithm for calculating rainfall intensity using Wilheit's generalized brightness-temperature/rainfall-intensity relationship.