Measurement of intensity of liquid precipitation using double frequency radar

Abstract

The rain intensity is very important characteristic of precipitation which is useful for many fields of people activity especially for such areas as agriculture and municipal services. That is why it is of big interest now to develop new approaches to measure precipitation intensity the most popular of which is radar methods permitted to obtain data distantly and promptly for large territories. Now it is known some radar approaches for measurement of rain precipitation. But the method grounded on measurement of radar reflectance Z mm6/m3 is the most widespread. It is based on use of dependence Z=xI <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Y</sup> , where x and y some constants, depended on climatic, geographic conditions and mechanism of precipitation formation. The main disadvantage of such approach is absence of universal correlation between radar reflectance and rain intensity. Accordingly data of different authors [1,2] the values of parameter x can be varied from 50 to 2000, y from 1 to 2,87. Such variation of parameters x andy strongly influences on accuracy of intensity measurement.