Severe Storms

Just as ground weather radars are extensively used to detect and characterize the properties of evolving storms, so too can one envision using nadir-looking vertically profiling radars orbiting Earth to probe clouds and storms and gather information about the nature and evolution of their condensed water. Some highlights of the contributions by Radar Science group members to the remote sensing of severe storms include:

• Starting in 1997, we contributed the first algorithm to combine optimally the instantaneous measurements of a spaceborne radar and radiometer (the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission radar and microwave imager) to estimate the spatial distribution and first-order microphysical property (mean hydrometeor size) of the condensed water in its field of view.
• The group's S. Tanelli and O. O. Sy pioneered the development of algorithms to estimate the line-of-sight velocity of hydrometeors within the field of view of Doppler radars such as EarthCare's Cloud Profiling Radar, and to account for imperfections in the retrievals due to various inhomogeneities of the typical collection of hydrometeors in the resolved volumes.
• Using coincident radar and radiometer measurements, F. J. Turk developed a state-of-the-art retrieval approach to produce estimates of the vertical distribution of precipitation from passive microwave radiometer measurements only, that has demonstrably negligible bias and low uncertainty.
• The group's S. Hristova-Veleva has applied various statistical techniques to interpret microwave observations to identify predictors of hurricane rapid intensity change.