Continuous rainfall derived from combined spaceborne microwave, IR and ground based sferics measurements

Infra-red (IR) images from geostationary satellites have provided continuous information on stratiform rainfall distributions and lightning flash rates have been shown to be proportional to convective rainfall rates. Lightning emits radio noise, known as sferics, at frequencies between 5 and 15 kHz that propagates over thousands of km. Sferics distributions in a region bounded by northern Alberta, equatorial America and the eastern Atlantic have been monitored nearly continuously by a network of five sferics receivers since mid-1997. An IR-sferics rainfall retrieval algorithm was empirically tuned with more definitive, albeit sparse, spaceborne microwave measurements to derive continuous rainfall measurements. Rainfall distributions from combined microwave-IR-sferics measurements are compared to conventional rainfall observations obtained from equatorial America