Satellite Sampling and Retrieval Errors in Regional Monthly Rain Estimates from TMI, AMSR-E, SSM/I, AMSU-B, and the TRMM PR

Abstract

AbstractPassive and active microwave rain sensors on board Earth-orbiting satellites estimate monthly rainfall from the instantaneous rain statistics collected during satellite overpasses. It is well known that climate-scale rain estimates from meteorological satellites incur sampling errors resulting from the process of discrete temporal sampling and statistical averaging. Sampling and retrieval errors ultimately become entangled in the estimation of the mean monthly rain rate. The sampling component of the error budget effectively introduces statistical noise into climate-scale rain estimates that obscures the error component associated with the instantaneous rain retrieval. Estimating the accuracy of the retrievals on monthly scales therefore necessitates a decomposition of the total error budget into sampling and retrieval error quantities. This paper presents results from a statistical evaluation of the sampling and retrieval errors for five different spaceborne rain sensors on board nine orbiting satellites. Using an error decomposition methodology developed by one of the authors, sampling and retrieval errors were estimated at 0.25° resolution within 150 km of ground-based weather radars located at Kwajalein, Marshall Islands, and Melbourne, Florida. Error and bias statistics were calculated according to the land, ocean, and coast classifications of the surface terrain mask developed for the Goddard Profiling (GPROF) rain algorithm. Variations in the comparative error statistics are attributed to various factors related to differences in the swath geometry of each rain sensor, the orbital and instrument characteristics of the satellite, and the regional climatology. The most significant result from this study found that each of the satellites incurred negative long-term oceanic retrieval biases of 10%–30%.