On the Use of Geo-IR Data for the Microwave Radiometer Based Global Precipitation Map

Abstract

Precipitation estimates from microwave imagers have been the best to draw the global precipitation map. However these sensors are on low earth orbit (LEO), thus temporal sampling is a major drawback. A simple technique to interpolate rain rate observed from LEO microwave imagers or to fill the gaps which microwave data are not available is presented by using moving vectors from geo-IR data. The technique is evaluated using Radar AMeDAS data sets near Japan. The results show that the moving vector technique reduces the error by 0-30% compared to a simple linear interpolation.