Tomographic reconstruction of rainfall fields through microwave attenuation measurements

Abstract

At each time step, the spatial distribution of rainfall intensity is calculated from a set of path-integrated microwave attenuation measurements, performed over the monitored area. A set of bilinear basis functions is used to reconstruct the rainfall space distribution from discrete samples. A recursive optimization technique is applied to solve the ill-conditioned system of linear algebraic equations providing the searched solution of each time step, thus, obtaining an estimate of space-time distribution of rainfall intensity. This method is analyzed using computer simulated data, and various results are shown that validate the proposed tomographic technique. -from Authors