Rainfall-rate estimation using gaussian mixture parameter estimator: Training and validation

Abstract

This study develops a Gaussian mixture rainfall-rate estimator (GMRE) for polarimetric radar-based rainfall-rate estimation, following a general framework based on the Gaussian mixture model and Bayes least squares estimation for weather radar-based parameter estimations. The advantages ofGMREare 1) it is a minimum variance unbiased estimator; 2) it is a general estimator applicable to different rain regimes in different regions; and 3) it is flexible and may incorporate/exclude different polarimetric radar variables as inputs. This paper also discusses training theGMREand the sensitivity of performance to mixture number.A large radar and surface gauge observation dataset collected in central Oklahoma during the multiyear Joint Polarization Experiment (JPOLE) field campaign is used to evaluate the GMRE approach. Results indicate that the GMRE approach can outperform existing polarimetric rainfall techniques optimized for this JPOLE dataset in terms of bias and root-mean-square error. © 2012 American Meteorological Society.