Physical and Microwave Radiative Properties of Precipitating Clouds. Part I: Principal Component Analysis of Observed Multichannel Microwave Radiances in Tropical Stratiform Rainfall

Abstract Using stringent criteria pertaining to rain-cloud optical thickness and horizontal extent, 3203 multichannel microwave observations of heavy, widespread tropical precipitation over ocean were selected from 9 months of global Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) data. These observations subsequently were found to be associated almost exclusively with stratiform rain areas in tropical cyclones. Because of the restrictions on optical thickness and spatial extent, the mean multichannel microwave brightness temperatures and their interchannel covariances are presumed to be determined primarily by the vertical microphysical structure of the rain clouds. The distribution of the above observations in seven-dimensional channel space is characterized concisely using principal component analysis. It is found that only three independent variables are sufficient to explain 97% of the variance in the correlation matrix. This result suggests that the radiometrically important microphysical properties of thes...

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