Quantifying and monitoring convection intensity from mm-wave sounder observations

Few systematic attempts to interpret the measurements of mm-wave radiometers over clouds and precipitation have been made to date because the scattering signatures of hydrometeors at these frequencies are very difficult to model. The few algorithms that have been developed try to retrieve surface precipitation, to which the observations are partially correlated but not directly sensitive. In fact, over deep clouds, mm-wave radiometers are most sensitive to the scattering from solid hydrometeors within the upper levels of the cloud. In addition, mm-wave radiometers have a definite advantage over the lower-frequency window-channel radiometers in that they have finer resolution and can therefore explicitly resolve deep convection. Preliminary analyses (in particular of NOAA's MHS brightness temperatures, as well as Megha-Tropiques's SAPHIR observations) indicate that the measurements are indeed very sensitive to the depth and intensity of convection. The challenge is to derive a robust approach to make quantitative estimates of the convection, for example the height and depth of the condensed water, directly from the mm-wave observations, as a function of horizontal location. To avoid having to rely on a specific set of microphysical assumptions, this analysis exploits the substantial amount of nearly- simultaneous coincident observations by mm-wave radiometers and orbiting atmospheric profiling radars in order to enforce unbiased consistency between the calculated brightness temperatures and the radar and radiometer observations.