Development and Validation of Spaceborne Dualfrequency Precipitation Radar for GPM

After the great success of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) started as an international mission and follow-on mission of the TRMM project to obtain more accurate and frequent observations of precipitation. The accurate measurement of precipitation will be achieved by the DPR installed on the GPM core satellite. In order to estimate accurate precipitation rate value, calibration and validation of the DPR algorithms and products are essential. From the experiences of TRMM validations, it is important for the DPR algorithm validation to compare between precipitation rate through the calculation of DPR algorithm and that of the directly observed precipitation rate over the validation site. For this purpose, the most important and difficult issue is to construct the database of the physical parameters for the precipitation retrieval algorithms of DPR from the ground-based data using well-calibrated instruments.