Nimbus-7 SMMR precipitation observations calibrated against surface radar during TAMEX
This paper represents a continuation of work begun by Petty and Katsaros (1990) on refining an attenuation-based technique for estimating rainfall parameters from polarized 37-GHz brightness temperatures. In the present work, Nimbus-7 SMMR normalized 37-GHz polarization differences P are compared with surface digital radar observations of oceanic precipitation, made during the Taiwan Area Mesoscale Experiment (TAMEX) for cases when the SMMR and the radar coverages of significant precipitation features were nearly simultaneous. After the radar data were corrected for range-dependent errors, relationships were determined between the 37-GHz P and the radar reflectivity factor Z. The relationship was used to generate a large set of simulated SMMR observations from all available TAMEX radar scans, to produce histograms and mean values of pixel-averaged rain rate as a function of P.