ESA METOP precipitation/droughts
| Principal investigator | Bob Su |
| Partner(s) | J. Wen (CAS, CN), Y. Ma (CAS, CN) |
| Funding | ESA, CAS |
| Research period | 2006 – 2010 |
Summary
Precipitation is the component of the global hydrological cycle that has the most direct and significant influence on the quality of human lives in terms of critical needs such as water for drinking and agriculture.
Timely high quality precipitation measurements with global, long-term coverage and frequent sampling are crucial to the understanding and prediction of Earth’s climate, weather, and global water and energy cycle processes, and their consequences for life on earth. Precipitation is rainfall, hail or snow that falls to the surface from the atmosphere associated with a wide variety of coherent atmospheric phenomena, from small convective showers to continental-scale monsoons.
At present, precipitation is observed through a combination of observations from a wide variety of instruments and systems. Precipitation gauges, surface-based rain radars, observations of passive microwave radiance from low earth orbit satellites and visible and infrared radiance observations of clouds from both low earth orbit and geostationary satellites. These observations are combined in different ways depending upon the required scales and accuracies, and on the type of observations available.
The most accurate single space-based observing system is the precipitation radar (PR) on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite. Its observations, taken from above precipitating systems, provide extraordinary depictions of the vertical distribution of hydrometeors. However, the ability of the radar to provide detailed coverage of any given system, or of accumulations over time, is limited because of its narrow swath width, and its coverage is restricted by its relatively low inclination orbit. The global network of isotopes in precipitation (GNIP), operated by the IAEA in cooperation with the WMO, provides precipitation isotope data that can be used to characterize the sources and transport of moisture at regional and continental scale. It is thought that when observation data from different sensors are combined in a modelling frame work, better estimation of precipitation becomes possible.
The task of this project will therefore concentrate on developing remote sensing and modelling methodologies for better estimation of precipitation at different spatial and temporal scales by using available observations and validations of the developed methodologies using observation data from recent field experiments. The derived precipitation products will be used to quantify moisture transport and recycling at different spatial and temporal scales.