A Comparative Study of Rain Intensities Retrieved from Radar and Satellite Observations: Two Cases of Heavy Rainfall Events by Changma and Bolaven (TY15)

Abstract

The heavy rainfalls caused large property damages and human casualties. For example, Changma caused 0.25 billion dollars in damages and 57 deaths and 112 missing by accompanying the torrentially convective heavy rainfall in Seoul, 2011. In addition, TY15 (Bolaven) caused a small damage by bringing a relatively small amount of rainfall and strong wind in Gwanju, 2012. The investigation and analyses of these mesoscale processes of rainfall events for different physical properties using KLAPS for weather environments of the above cases were performed. These typical and ideal meoscale systems by better and more favorable cloud systems were chosen to retrieve rain intensity from Radar and Chullian data. The quantitative rain intensities of Radar and Chullian differ greatly from the ground-based gauge values with underestimating over 50 mm/hr at the peak time of hourly maximum rain intensity about over than 85 mm/hr. However, the Radar rain intensity demonstrated approximately lower than 35 mm/hr, and the Chullian rain intensity less than 60 mm/hr for Changma in Seoul, 2011. For typhoon (TY15, Bolaven) in Gwangju, similarly, the quantitative rain intensities of Radar and Chullian differ from the ground-based gauge values. At the peak time, the hourly maximum rain intensity of ground-based gauge was more than 15 mm/hr. However, the Radar rain intensity showed lower than 5 mm/hr, and the Chullian rain intensity lower than 10 mm/hr. Regarding the above two cases of typhoon and Changma, even though Radar and Chullian rain intensities have been underestimated when compared to the ground-based rain intensity, the distributions of time scale features of both Radar and Chullian rain intensities still delineated a similar tendency of rain intensity distribution of the ground-based gauge data.