The exploitation of data from meteorological geostationary satellite Meteosat Second Generation for rainfall estimates coming from severe convective storms
Abstract
The study deals with possible applications of CRR (Convective Rainfall Rate) algorithm which computes instantaneous rain rates and satellite precipitation estimates (SPE) from convective clouds for the area of the Czech Republic (CR). MSG data are available with a horizontal and temporal resolution of circa 4 x 6 km and 15 min respectively.
Radar measurements (radar Brdy and Skalky) with a horizontal and temporal resolution of 1 km and 10 min, respectively, were used for calibration of 2-D and 3-D matrices which represent functional relationships between given combination of values from spectral channels or their differences and corresponding rain rates. The main goal of this paper is to develop different types of calibration matrices over the area of the Czech Republic and to compare them with the original one.
The calibration period was delimitated by summer months (from June to August) of the years from 2006 to 2008. Obtained hourly SPE were verified using independent data set with estimates of hourly rainfalls that had been obtained by combination of radar and rain gauge measurements.
Results showed that calibration of matrices using Czech data improved resulting SPE. However, satellite-based SPE information should be considered as additional information to radar measurements which are always more accurate.