Determination of Ice Water Content in Convective Cloud using Satellitic Microwave Sounding Unit and Lighting Activity

Using the Advance Microwave Sounding Unit AMSU-B onboard NOAA series satellites, the studies can be focused on understanding the effects of the contents of ice and water on brightness temperatures. The brightness temperatures of the three channels near to the water vapor absorption line centered at 183.3 GHz, have high sensitivity to frozen hydrometeors in precipitating clouds. With the ice contents ascend, the brightness temperatures descend result from the ice scatter attenuation. The temperature weighting functions of the three water vapor channels maximize at different altitudes, for convective cloud systems, the brightness temperatures range at 183.3plusmn1 GHz suggested the responses mainly above the 250 hpa level, about 11 km, while the weighting height of 183.3plusmn3 GHz and 183.3plusmn7 GHz is about 8.5 km and 6.5 km, that is the level of 350 hpa and 450 hpa. The present study derives the retrieved method for the vertical distributions of frozen hydrometeors, and compute IWP (ice and water path) and IWTH (ice and water thick) using satellite measurements at the AMSU-B water vapor channels. The good correspondence of the retrieved results of deep convective clouds with lightning confirms the methods.