TITLE:
Regional Profiles and Precipitation Retrievals and Analysis Using FY-3C MWHTS
AUTHORS:
Jieying He, Shengwei Zhang
KEYWORDS:
Precipitation, Atmospheric Profile, Microwave Humidity and Temperature Sounder, Tibetan Plateau
JOURNAL NAME:
Atmospheric and Climate Sciences,
Vol.6 No.2,
April
21,
2016
ABSTRACT: The 89 and 150 GHz channels operated in
window are sensitive to precipitation and humidity. The 183 GHz
humidity-sensitive channels and 118 GHz temperature-sensitive channels of the
Microwave Humidity and Temperature Sounder (MWHTS) on the Chinese Feng Yun 3C
MWHTS (FY-3C MWHTS) polar-orbit meteorological satellite responds in part to
precipitation. Combining 118 and 183 GHz channels, the paper develops a passive
sub-millimeter atmospheric profile and precipitation retrievals algorithm for
MWHTS onboard the FY-3C (Feng Yun-3C) satellite. The retrieval algorithm
employs a number of back propagation neural network estimators trained and
evaluated using the validated global reference physical model NCEP/WRF/ARTS and
works for land and seawater with latitude between -40 to 40 degree. NCEP data
per 6 hours were downloaded to run the Weather Research and Forecast model WRF,
and to derive the typical precipitation data for the whole world. The
Atmospheric Radiative Transfer Simulator ARTS is feasible for performing
simulations of atmospheric radiative transfer. The results show that the profile
retrievals using BP-NN algorithm has the best correlation with those from
radiosonde, which is less than 18% and 1 K of root mean square error,
respectively. For precipitation rate retrievals, a much better agreement is
reached with rain gauge and ECMWF datasets, the RMS is between 0.80 to 30.24
mm/h for sea surface and 0.789 to 33.11 mm/h for land surface according to the
classification by precipitation type. Also, the analysis of retrievals located
in Tibetan plateau is provided as an example to justify the robustness and
performance of retrieving model.