Correction of Three-Dimensional Effects for Passive Microwave Remote Sensing of Convective Clouds

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a simple approach to adjust microwave brightness temperature distributions obtained from slant-path measurements for projection effects. Horizontal displacement in the direction of sight is caused by signal contributions from other than near-surface layers that are projected to the footpoint of observation. In particular at frequencies sensitive to ice particle scattering the horizontal projection effect can amount to values as big as the vertical cloud extent. Based on cloud model–generating, three-dimensional hydrometeor distributions at subsequent model time steps and a modified one-dimensional radiative transfer model, the high correlation of effective radiance contribution altitudes and brightness temperatures at 37.0 and 85.5 GHz is demonstrated. For these altitudes, described by the centers of gravity of the spectral weighting functions, regression equations are derived with standard errors below 0.61 km at 85.5 GHz and 0.22 km at 37.0 GHz for both the Special Sensor Mi...