Improving rainfall measurement accuracy in spaceborne rain radar over sea

The problem of improving techniques for rainfall intensity estimation over the sea surface through spaceborne rain radars is analysed. In such case, the backscattered signal is composed of a rainfall volumetric contribution and of the sea surface contribution, which gives rise to the problem of extracting the information of interest from the composite echo. In particular, the authors focus on the problem of deriving a better estimation of the rain perturbed backscattering coefficient of the sea surface from polarimetric measurements, as a means for achieving such improvements. The effects of the additional roughness of the sea surface due to the rainfall have been taken into account and analysed by resorting to an electromagnetic model able to provide a full polarimetric description of the rainfall perturbed sea surface