The development of rainfall retrievals from radar at Darwin

Abstract

<jats:p>Abstract. The U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program Tropical Western Pacific site hosted a C-band POLarization (CPOL) radar in Darwin, Australia. It provides two decades of tropical rainfall characteristics useful for validating global circulation models. Rainfall retrievals from radar assume characteristics about the droplet size distribution (DSD) that vary significantly. To minimize the uncertainty associated with DSD variability, new radar rainfall techniques use dual polarization and specific attenuation estimates. This study challenges the applicability of several specific attenuation and dual-polarization based rainfall estimators in tropical settings using a 4-year archive of Darwin disdrometer datasets in conjunction with CPOL observations. This assessment is based on three metrics: statistical uncertainty estimates, principal component analysis (PCA), and comparisons of various retrievals from CPOL data. The PCA shows that over 99 % of the variability in estimated rainfall rate R can be explained by radar reflectivity factor for rainfall rates 1 10 mm hr−1. Rainfall estimates during these conditions primarily originate from deep convective clouds with median drop diameters greater than 1.5 mm. Using specific attenuation for estimating R generally does not provide additional skill beyond other metrics for Darwin. An uncertainty analysis and intercomparison with CPOL show that a CSU-blended technique for tropical oceans, with modified estimators developed from VDIS observations, is most appropriate for use in all cases, such as when 1 </jats:p>