Abstract
Abstract. As rainfall constitutes the main source of water for the terrestrial hydrological processes, accurate and reliable measurement and prediction of its spatial and temporal distribution over a wide range of scales is an important goal for hydrology. We investigate the potential of ground-based weather radar to provide such measurements through a theoretical analysis of some of the associated observation uncertainties. A stochastic model of range profiles of raindrop size distributions is employed in a Monte Carlo simulation experiment to investigate the rainfall retrieval uncertainties associated with weather radars operating at X-, C-, and S-band. We focus in particular on the errors and uncertainties associated with rain-induced signal attenuation and its correction for incoherent, non-polarimetric, single-frequency, operational weather radars. The performance of two attenuation correction schemes, the (forward) Hitschfeld-Bordan algorithm and the (backward) Marzoug-Amayenc algorithm, is analyzed for both moderate (assuming a 50 km path length) and intense Mediterranean rainfall (for a 30 km path). A comparison shows that the backward correction algorithm is more stable and accurate than the forward algorithm (with a bias in the order of a few percent for the former, compared to tens of percent for the latter), provided reliable estimates of the total path-integrated attenuation are available. Moreover, the bias and root mean square error associated with each algorithm are quantified as a function of path-averaged rain rate and distance from the radar in order to provide a plausible order of magnitude for the uncertainty in radar-retrieved rain rates for hydrological applications.
Highlights
According to Beven (2006), “the most important is providing the techniques to measure integrated fluxes and storages at useful scales”
Accurate and reliable measurement and prediction of the spatial and temporal distribution of rainfall over a wide range of scales is an important goal for hydrology, because rainfall constitutes the main source of water for the terrestrial hydrological processes
We have presented a theoretical analysis of the observation uncertainties associated with rainfall estimates from groundbased weather radar
Summary
According to Beven (2006), “the most important (problem in hydrology of the 21st Century) is providing the techniques to measure integrated fluxes and storages at useful scales”. Berne: Stochastic simulation of radar rainfall attenuation correction temporal coverage of extended areas from one single measurement site; (2) they allow rapid access for real-time hydrological applications, both concerning rainfall measurement and short-term forecasting; (3) their combined spatial and temporal resolution is generally higher than what can be obtained using rain gauge networks. We focus in particular on the rainfall retrieval errors and uncertainties associated with raininduced signal attenuation and its correction for incoherent, non-polarimetric, single-frequency operational weather radars. This provides an extension and generalization of previous work (e.g., Berne and Uijlenhoet, 2005a, 2006), which concentrated on the radar meteorological aspects of attenuation correction.
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