Data: giovedì 9 febbraio 2023 alle 17:30
Abstract:
The detection and tracking of heavy precipitation from space is one of the key topics of the satellite remote sensing. Heavy precipitation generally forms inside deep convective clouds, a type of “tower cloud” reaching the top of the atmosphere (around 10-12 km) where the melting of frozen hydrometeors (graupels and hail) enhances the amount of waterfall at ground. The main difficulty of satellite remote sensing is offering a robust detection model of ice clouds imbedded into the large-scale storms responsible of local flash floods or intense hailstorms. During the last two decades the improvement of microwave technology on board to the sun-synchronous satellites allowed to increase the performances of methods and algorithms for the detection of precipitation from space.
In this seminar organized for the series “Incontri del giovedì” at CNR-IEIIT, overflying on the fundamentals of microwave radiative transfer, a new microwave-based satellite method to detect deep convections and hailstorms will be presented. The probability-based MicroWave Cloud Classification-Hail (MWCC-H) method developed by Laviola et al. (2020a-b) is designed for the frequency range 150-170 GHz of microwave radiometers orbiting with the Global Precipitation Measurements Constellation (GPM-C). The application of the MWCC-H computational scheme to the whole GPM-C demonstrates the high potential of method to map the evolution of hail-bearing systems at very high temporal rate. The performances of MWCC-H are also exploited to produce a coherent and homogeneous dataset for studying the climatology of severe convective storms at global scale.
Ongoing experiments are currently simulating the application of the MWCC-H to the new generation microwave sensors (MWS, MWI) developed in the EUMETSAT Polar System-Second Generation (EPS-SG) programme. These studies fit the main scientific requirements of further satellite missions where low-orbit constellations of nano-satellites are used to recursively monitor at very high-spacetime resolution the evolution stages of short-life cycle convective systems.
