An Analytic Solution to Precipitation Attenuation Expression with Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar Based on Volterra Integral Equation

Abstract

Precipitation is closely related to the production and daily life of human beings, so accurate precipitation measurement is of great significance. Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a microwave remote sensing technology with high resolution, which provides an opportunity to improve the accuracy of precipitation inversion. In this paper, the radar attenuation expression is analyzed according to the scattering characteristics of rain, snow and ground. Combined with the Volterra integral equation of the second kind, the solution to the expression, the precipitation horizontal variation of the double-layer model, can be obtained. The simulated result of this method is in good agreement with the given horizontal variation of precipitation. Compared with the original VIE method, which only considers the effect of rainfall, the method in this paper considers both rainfall and snowfall; compared with the Model Oriented Statistical (MOS) method, the method in this paper not only reduces the number of empirical coefficients used and thus reduces the workload in the early stage and retrieval process and its application limits, but it will also increase the accuracy of the inversion of the horizontal variation.