Vertical precipitation profiles estimated by satellite-based passive microwave retrievals

Abstract

Passive microwave (MW) observation from low Earth-orbiting satellites is one of the major sources of information for global precipitation monitoring. Although various precipitation retrieval techniques based on passive MW observation have been developed, most of them focus on estimating precipitation rate at near surface height. Vertical profile information of precipitation is meaningful for process-based understanding of precipitation systems. Also, a previous study found that the use of the vertical precipitation profile information can improve sub-hourly surface precipitation estimates (Utsumi et al., 2019).