Physics-based scattering model of rainfall over sea surface

Abstract

Because of its critical role in tropical storm events, rainfall over sea surface has always been an important subject for remote sensing. Recently, space-borne high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been found to be a potential tool for rainfall observation. However, many interesting phenomenon of rain-wind over sea surface as revealed by SAR images are still not fully understood. This paper attempts to develop a physics-based radiative transfer model to capture the scattering behavior of rainfall over rough sea surface. Raindrop scattering and attenuation is modeled as Rayleigh spherical particle, while rain-induced rough surface is described by the Log-Gaussian ring-wave spectrum. The model is compared with empirical models and measurements.

Evaluating the Effects of Raindrop Motion on the Accuracy of the Precipitation Inversion Algorithm by X-SAR

“…Studies focusing on rain effects on wind field retrieval have developed methods to recognize heavy rain-affected areas and reconstruct SAR-retrieved wind speed in those areas [23,24]. However, many interesting rain-related phenomena revealed by SAR images are still not fully understood due to poor theoretical modeling of the rain-wind-wave interactions [25].…”