Comparison of the Scaling Characteristics of Rainfall Derived from Space-Based and Ground-Based Radar Observations

Abstract In view of the importance of tropical rainfall and the ubiquitous need for its estimates in climate modeling, the authors assess the ability of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) precipitation radar (PR) to characterize the scaling characteristics of rainfall by comparing the derived results with those obtained from the ground-based radar (GR) data. The analysis is based on 59 months of PR and GR rain rates at three TRMM ground validation (GV) sites: Houston, Texas; Melbourne, Florida; and Kwajalein Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands. The authors consider spatial scales ranging from about 4 to 64 km at a fixed temporal scale corresponding to the sensor “instantaneous” snapshots (∼15 min). The focus is on the scaling of the marginal moments, which allows estimation of the scaling parameters from a single scene of data. The standard rainfall products of the PR and the GR are compared in terms of distributions of the scaling parameter estimates, the connection between the scaling pa...

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