Inversion of vertical rainfall field based on earth-space links

Abstract

The accurate measurement of rain intensity and its distribution in vertical direction can not only help to understand the process of rainfall development, but also play an important role in human life such as agriculture, weather forecasting, water resources management, and natural disaster warning. According to the analysis of the geometric structure of earth-space link and propagation model of electromagnetic wave in atmosphere, in this paper we propose a method to reconstruct two-dimensional(2D) vertical rainfall field by using earth-space links. Firstly, the measured data of micro rain radar (MRR) from Nanjing are used to generate three real vertical rainfall fields which are marked as I, II and III respectively. Secondly, based on the analysis of the earth-space link’s geometry and the effect of signal attenuation from other factors such as scintillation, atmosphere gas and cloud, the vertical rainfall field inversion model is established. According to the power-law relationship between rain intensity and rain attenuation, which is given by International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the simultaneous algebraic reconstruction technique (SART) is used to inverse the vertical rainfall field. Then, one earth station which can receive a 17 GHz signal from satellite is employed to detect the vertical rainfall field. However, the simulation results show that it is difficult for one earth station to achieve the inversion of rainfall field, and that the correlation coefficients between rainfall fields and inversed fields are 0.556, 0.504 and 0.364 respectively. Based on the result, two earth stations are jointly used. In this simulation, the result shows that after 500 iterations the correlation coefficients all increase above 0.98, and the average biases between rainfall field I, II, III and their inversed fields are 0.122, 0.159 and 0.537 mm/h, respectively. Meanwhile, the Euclidean distances decrease to 0.246, 0.235 and 0.812 mm/h, and the relative errors of entropy are both less than 2%. It can be seen from the inversion fields that the vertical distribution of rain rate is close to that of the real field, which suggests that the method proposed in this paper can basically achieve the inversion of vertical rainfall field by using earth-space links. In addition, with the combined detection of three earth stations the accuracy of the inversion results is significantly improved. The correlation coefficients are all close to 1 and the mean deviations are all on the order of 10^–12 mm/h, indicating that the 2D vertical rainfall fields are accurately reconstructed. In the near future, the satellite constellation system will be globally deployed, which can promote the applications of our method in areas, such as plateaus, mountains and islands, where there exist no traditional observation data, serving as a supplement to existing precipitation measurements.