Improved Gridded Precipitation Data Derived from Microwave Link Attenuation

The motivation for improving gridded precipitation data lies in weather now-casting and flood forecasting. Therefore, over the past decade, Commercial Microwave Link (CML) attenuation data have been used to determine rain rates between microwave antennas, and to produce more accurate countrywide pre...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRemote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 13; no. 15; p. 2953
Main Authors Silver, Micha, Karnieli, Arnon, Fredj, Erick
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.08.2021
Subjects
Antennas
commercial microwave links
dynamic time warping
Flood forecasting
Gauges
Hydrologic data
interpolation
Links
Meteorological radar
Microwave antennas
Microwave attenuation
Motivation
Precipitation
Radar
Rain
Rainfall
Rainfall measurement
Topography
Weather forecasting
weather radar
Netherlands
Israel
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Summary:The motivation for improving gridded precipitation data lies in weather now-casting and flood forecasting. Therefore, over the past decade, Commercial Microwave Link (CML) attenuation data have been used to determine rain rates between microwave antennas, and to produce more accurate countrywide precipitation grids. CML networks offer a unique advantage for precipitation measurements due to their high density. However, these data experience uncertainty from several sources as reported in earlier research. This current work determines the reliability of rainfall measurements for each link by comparing CML-derived rain rates to adjusted weather radar rainfall at the link location, over three months. Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is applied to the pair of CML/radar time-series data in two study areas, Israel and Netherlands. Based on the DTW amplitude and temporal distance, unreliable links are identified and flagged, and interpolated gridded precipitation data are derived in each country after filtering out those unreliable links. Correlations between CML-derived grids and rain observations from an independent set of gauges, tested over several rain events in both study areas, are higher for the reliable subset of CML than the full set. For certain storm events, the Kendall rank correlation for the set of reliable CML is almost double that of the complete set, demonstrating that improved gridded precipitation data can be obtained by removing unreliable links.
ISSN:2072-4292
2072-4292
DOI:10.3390/rs13152953