Abstract
The estimations of the surface rain intensity and rain-related physical variables derived from two independent Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite sensors, TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) and Precipitation Radar (PR), were compared over four different oceans. The precipitating clouds developed most frequently in the warmest sea surface temperature (SST) region of the west Pacific, which is 1.5 times more frequent than in the east Pacific and the tropical Atlantic oceans. However, the east Pacific exhibited the most intense rain intensity for the convective and mixed rain types while the tropical Atlantic showed the most intense rain intensity for all TMI rainy pixels. It was found that the deviation of TMI-derived rain rate yielded a big difference in region-to-region and rain type-to-type if the PR rain intensity value is assumed to be closer to the truth. Furthermore, the deviation by rain types showed opposite signs between convective and non-convective rain types. It was found that the region-to-region deviation differences reached more than 200% even though the selected tropical oceans have relatively similar geophysical environments. Therefore, the validation for the microwave rain estimation needs to be performed according to both rain types and climate regimes, and it also requires more sophisticated TMI algorithm which reflects the locality of rainfall characteristics.
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