Active and passive remote sensing of precipitating storms during CaPE. Part II: Intercomparison of precipitation retrievals over land from AMPR radiometer and CP-2 radar

One of the recent campaigns devoted to precipitation studies using both active and passive microwave remote sensing systems was the Convection and Precipitation/Electrification Experiment (CaPE), which took place in central Florida during the summer of 1991. During CaPE, the airborne Advanced Microwave Precipitation Radiometer (AMPR), having four channels at 10.7, 19.35, 37.1 and 85.5 GHz and the National Center for Atmospheric Research CP-2 multiparameter radar at S-band (3 GHz) and X-band (10 GHz) were operated simultaneously. In this paper, we compare estimated hydrometeor liquid/ice water contents and surface rainrates, both retrieved from the AMPR radiometer and CP-2 radar measurements, for a case study consisting of a heavy precipitating storm over land near Cape Canaveral on August 12, 1991. The multi-frequency radiometer-based retrieval scheme uses a cloud-precipitation dataset generated from a cloud model and extended by a physically-constrained Monte Carlo procedure, along with a discrete-ordinate radiative transfer model and a principal component statistical technique to help formulate non-linear regression equations for the sought-after hydrometeor quantities. By applying linear discriminant analysis, the algorithm is used to estimate column integrated liquid/ice water contents, as well as the vertical profiles of these quantities to within a specified accuracy. Rainfall rates are estimated either by non-linear regression or by a suitable fallout model. The analysis has confined itself to along-track nadir-looking AMPR measuremets to avoid complications with variable polarization mixing and geometric distortion for off-nadir observations. Considering the different model assumptions used in the two types of retrieval algorithms and the diverse geophysical information content within the two types of measurements, substantial agreement between the radar- and radiometer-derived retrievals has been achieved for the columnar liquid/ice water contents and rainrates.