Comparison of the TRMM Precipitation Radar rainfall estimation with ground-based disdrometer and radar measurements in South Greece

The performance of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Precipitation Radar (PR) rainfall estimation algorithm is assessed, locally, in Crete island, south Greece, using data from a 2D-video disdrometer and a ground-based, X-band, polarimetric radar. A three-parameter, normalized Gamma drop size distribution is fitted to the disdrometer rain spectra; the latter are classified in stratiform and convective rain types characterized by different relations between distribution parameters. The method of moments estimates more accurately the distribution parameters than the best fit technique, which exhibits better agreement with and is more biased by the observed droplet distribution at large diameter values. Power laws between the radar reflectivity factor (Z) and the rainfall rate (R) are derived from the disdrometer data. A significant diversity of the prefactor and the exponent of the estimated power laws is observed, depending on the scattering model and the regression technique. The Z-R relationships derived from the disdrometer data are compared to those obtained from TRMM-PR data. Generally, the power laws estimated from the two datasets are different. Specifically, the greater prefactor found for the disdrometer data suggests an overestimation of rainfall rate by the TRMM-PR algorithm for light and moderate stratiform rain, which was the main rain type in the disdrometer dataset. Finally, contemporary data from the TRMM-PR and a ground-based, X-band, polarimetric radar are analyzed. Comparison of the corresponding surface rain rates for a rain event with convective characteristics indicates a large variability of R in a single TRMM-PR footprint, which typically comprises several hundreds of radar pixels. Thus, the coarse spatial resolution of TRMM-PR may lead to miss of significant high local peaks of convective rain. Also, it was found that the high temporal variability of convective rain may introduce significant errors in the estimation of bias of the satellite rainfall estimates with respect to data from ground-based radars.