Analysis of Atmospheric Effects on X-BAND Synthetic Aperture Radar Observations and Precipitation Estimation

This paper proposes a new methodology for the detection and quantitative estimation of intense atmospheric precipitations on images acquired by Synthetic Aperture Radars (SARs) operating at X-Band wavelengths. The proposed methodology consists of two successive steps. The first one allows detecting and distinguishing areas subjected to intense precipitation events, permanent water surfaces, flood areas and snow coverage. The second step derives an estimation of the precipitation rate using the event attenuation estimated at the previous step. This methodology is applied on two COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) satellite case studies. The first one is relative to a severe precipitation weather event, occurred in northwestern Italy (close to Liguria region) on November 3-8, 2011. The second one is relative to Hurricane “Irene” event, occurred in Eastern United States (close to Delaware) on late August 2011. In both cases X-SAR echoes and estimated rain rate is compared with corresponding products derived by available ground Weather Radars (WRs). The correlation of the precipitating cloud fields between CSK X-SAR and WR images is significant in all case studies.