Rainfall forecasts compiled by the South African Weather Service (SAWS) are used daily by agriculture, industry, sportsmen and the general public. Because of the importance of the rainfall forecast, it is of considerable interest to know how reliable these forecasts are. The SAWS evaluates the rainfall forecasts issued by the Central Forecasting Office (CFO) on a daily basis. A hit score is det...

Accurate and reliable rain rate estimates are important for various hydrometeorological applications. Consequently, rain sensors of different types have been deployed in many regions. In this work, measurements from different instruments, namely, rain gauge, weather radar, and microwave link, are combined for the first time to estimatewith greater accuracy the spatial distribution and intensity...

Rain attenuation is a major source of impairment to signal propagation at microwave and millimeter wave bands. The procedures for the estimation of rain attenuation values as regard to microwave signals however rely mainly on 1-minute rain rate statistics, particularly those obtained locally from experimental measurement campaigns over a given location. In this paper, we present recent results ...

This study examines the characteristics of winter (Dec–Feb) rain-on-snow events and their relationship to surface air temperatures to reveal potential changes in rain-on-snow days under a warming climate over northern Eurasia. We found that rain-on-snow events mostly occur over European Russia during winter. Rain-on-snow days increase as air temperature increases and are primarily attributable ...

In this paper, rain statistics of 10 years record in Taiwan area was used to investigate the transmission performance of the Ka-band LMDS system with QAM modulation. Emphasis was placed to investigate the effects of rain fading under MQAM modulation schemes. It is found that for LMDS cellular network, M-QAM modulation is difficult to provide an effective and reliable high speed transmission for...

Understanding the causes of savanna–forest dynamics is vital as small but widespread changes in the extent of tropical forests can have major impacts on global climate, biodiversity and human well-being. Comparison of aerial photographs for 50 rain-forest patches in Kakadu National Park had previously revealed a landscape-wide monotonic expansion of rain-forest boundaries between 1964 and 2004....

Amazonian rain forest-savanna boundaries are highly sensitive to climatic change and may also play an important role in rain forest speciation. However, their dynamics over millennial time scales are poorly understood. Here, we present late Quaternary pollen records from the southern margin of Amazonia, which show that the humid evergreen rain forests of eastern Bolivia have been expanding sout...

A radar image acquired by the C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) aboard the European Remote Sensing satellite ERS-2 over the coastal waters south of Singapore showing radar signatures of a strong tropical squall line (“Sumatra Squall”) is compared with coincident and collocated weather radar data. Squall line features such as the gust front, areas of updraft convergence, and rain areas are i...

This study focuses on improving the retrieval of rain from measured microwave brightness temperatures and the capability of the retrieved field to represent the mesoscale structure of a small intense hurricane. For this study, a database is constructed from collocated Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) precipitation radar (PR) and the TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) data resulting in about ...

The presence of rain in the sub-satellite track can significantly degrade altimeter measurements by causing an attenuation of the backscattered signal, a change in its path length through the atmosphere and a change in the mean square slope of the sea surface. This can cause errors, not only in the measurement of the satellite altitude, but also in the determination of wind speed and wave heigh...