Analysis of rainfall signatures on COSMO-SkyMed X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar observations

This paper presents an investigation on the rainfall signature for two COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) satellite case studies. Both of them are relative to a severe precipitation weather event, occurred in northwestern Italy (close to Liguria region) on November 3-8, 2011. This event was monitored by using a number of CSK images provided by the Italian Space Agency (ASI). In this case CSK X-SAR data have been compared with the weather radar (WR) Italian Radar National Mosaic. A third case study is relative to Hurricane “Irene” event, occurred in Eastern United States (close to Delaware) on late August 2011. CSK X-SAR images are compared with respect to concurrent ground-based S-band NEXRAD weather radar reflectivities. The correlation of the precipitating cloud fields between CSK X-SAR and WR images is significant in all case studies. An application of a refined XSAR-based precipitation retrieval method is presented. The X-SAR surface response is estimated using ancillary data, such as land cover maps and a digital elevation model (DEM).