Evaluation of Precipitation Type Determination from TRMM Observations

Abstract

The TRMM mission is dedicated to observing and understanding the impact of tropical rainfall. Two of the important products of the TRMM mission are classification of precipitation into convective and stratiform type as well determination of the height of the bright band. Currently TRMM uses an algorithm to arrive at these products based on a characterization of horizontal and vertical variability of reflectivity. This paper presents result of a new algorithm developed using wavelets transform. The algorithms for wavelet analysis based products of both convective/stratiform classification as well as bright band detection are described. The results obtained from wavelet algorithms are compared against both the current products as well as ground radar inferences. The results show that the wavelet-based analysis provides fairly accurate results for both convective/stratiform classification as well as bright band determination.