Cloud top microphysics as a tool for precipitation measurements

Daniel Rosenfeld, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

Introduction Rainfall measurements from space are based on the interpretation of the electromagnetic radiation that is scattered and emitted from the clouds, precipitation and the underlying surface, and is monitored by the satellite instruments at the various wavebands. The interaction of the radiation with the cloud and precipitation particles strongly depends on their composition and size distribution, as described by the Mie theory. Therefore, variability in the cloud microstructure and precipitation properties for clouds having the same macroscopic properties and rain intensity would result in substantial changes in the satellite measured radiation that comes from the rain cloud and hence would cause large variability in the inferred rain intensity for a given actual rainfall. The variability in precipitation composition and size distribution affects mainly the direct rainfall measurements. Direct measurements use the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that interacts strongly with the precipitation particles while weakly interacting with the small cloud particles. The passive microwave band is used for direct measurements of precipitation because precipitation size lies within this waveband and radiation interacts most strongly with particles that are of similar wavelength. The strength of the interaction for smaller particles decreases with the 6th power of the particle size (Rayleigh scattering). Using microwave takes us closest to the desirable situation of "visible" precipitation within "transparent" clouds. Indirect measurements are defined as such that infer the precipitation by observing other cloud properties. Potential rain clouds are sufficiently optically thick to be opaque in the visible and IR wavebands. Therefore, the radiation that reaches the satellite sensors typically comes from the cloud droplets and ice particles near the cloud tops, with little or no contribution from the actual precipitation particles. The indirect measurements relate the precipitation mainly to the cloud top temperatures and its type, i.e., convective or stratiform. However, precipitation in clouds of a given depth can vary greatly in clouds of different composition, i.e., cloud particle size distribution and phase ice or water. These differences can determine not only the precipitation properties, but also the difference between precipitating or rainless clouds that have otherwise the same cloud top temperatures and dimensions (Rosenfeld, 1999 and 2000). Given this state of affairs, it is clear that recognizing cloud microstructure can potentially be used for improving the accuracy of rainfall measurements from space with direct measurement methods and even more so for the indirect methods. In this chapter we will review the ways cloud microstructure affect the precipitation, and the ways by which this can be utilized for enhancing the accuracy of precipitation measurements from space. The simplest indirect rainfall measurement is the GOES precipitation Index (GPI) that estimates rainfall from the product of the mean fractional coverage of cloud colder than 235K in a 2.5 x 2.5 box, the length of the averaging period in hours and a constant of 3 mm h-1 (Arkin and Meisner 1987). This method works very well in the tropical convective clouds, but fails in the extra-tropical rain cloud systems. Atlas and Bell (1992)

suggested that the fundamental reason for the excellent correlation between the area of cloud tops < 235oC and the surface precipitation on the large scale in the tropics is because the cold cloud tops are in fact the anvils of the cumulonimbus (Cb) clouds. In the deep tropics, with little dynamic complicating factors, the area time integral of the anvils area is proportional to the amount of air that is advected to the upper troposphere by the Cb clouds throughout their lifecycle. The requirement for inclusion of complete lifecycle of the convective systems explains why the GPI correlates so highly with the integral surface rainfall over large areas, but has little skill over small domains. The robust GPI relation between cold cloud top temperature area and rainfall amount on the surface were competitive with the direct rainfall measurement methods for convective clouds over the tropical oceans (Ebert et al., 1996). However, over land this was no longer the case. McCollum et al. (2000) showed that the both the GPI and passive microwave rainfall data overestimated the rainfall by a factor of 2 over Africa, while having no significant bias over South America. They suggested that this is due to systematic microphysical changes in the cloud properties between the two continents, such that the smaller drops that dominate the clouds over Africa affect the passive microwave signal and the time-area extent of the cold cloud tops in ways that appears as greater rainfall than the true amount. How that can happen will be the subject of the next sections.

Relations between cloud drop size and precipitation forming processes Clouds form by condensation of vapor on aerosols that serve as cloud drop condensation nuclei (CCN). The cloud droplets continue growing by condensation of vapor. Satellite measurements can detect re, the cloud drop effective radius (re=<r3>/<r2>, where r is the radius of the cloud droplets in the measurement volume) using methods that were pioneered by Arking and Childs (1985) and Nakajima and King (1990). The probability of collision and coalescence of drops with re < 12 m is very small, to the extent that raindrops cannot form by this mechanism within the lifetime of clouds. This probability increases fast with droplet size, so that in clouds with re> ~14 m coalescence of cloud droplets into raindrops leads to fast formation of rainfall (Rosenfeld and Gutman, 1994, Gerber, 1996). When cloud drops are too small for creating raindrops by coalescence, precipitation can still form by ice processes. This requires that the cloud will develop to heights above the zero isotherm level. The small cloud droplets can remain super cooled (i.e., at a liquid state but colder than 0C) typically up to -15C to -25C, and in extreme cases all the way to the homogeneous freezing isotherm of -38C (Rosenfeld and Woodley, 2000). Ice precipitation develops in such clouds when ice crystals form and grow on expense of the cloud drops due to the smaller vapor pressure on ice than on water. When the crystals grow they get rimed by the super cooled cloud droplets, and so become graupel particles of several mm in diameter. When graupel continues growing beyond about 1 cm they can become hailstones. Larger water drops freeze faster at higher temperatures. Therefore, clouds with large droplets that are fast to coalesce into rain drops also produce ice precipitation particles, typically graupel, at relatively high temperature of -5C to -10C. Therefore, the re of the droplets near cloud top can be used to infer also the presence of ice precipitation from clouds with cold tops, using the same threshold of re>14 m as for "warm rain" clouds. In mature or stratiform clouds with slow vertical air motions there is sufficient time for the cloud drops to freeze and become ice crystals that aggregate into snow flakes. The

super cooled water at the upper and hence colder portions of such clouds is typically completely converted into ice crystals and precipitation particles, so that the clouds are said to be glaciated. Ice crystals that form by heterogeneous freezing in a super cooled cloud grow on expense of the cloud drops, so that in such glaciated cloud each ice crystal contains water amount that was previously distributed in many drops. Therefore, the ice crystals are much larger than the cloud droplets from which they were formed, and hence possess much larger re than that of the source water cloud. These ice crystals aggregate with time into snow flakes. When they fall through super cooled clouds the snow flakes continue growing by accreting the cloud droplets. Distinction must be made here between this situation and ice clouds that form by homogeneous freezing of cloud droplets near or above the -38C isotherm. Such homogeneously frozen drops retain their mass and become similarly small and numerous ice crystals, that have no efficient mechanism to aggregate into precipitation particles at such cold temperatures and small sizes. This situation can be detected by the existence of ice clouds with small re at temperatures < 38C. Such clouds would be poor precipitators, because only a small fraction of the cloud water is converted into rainfall. On the other hand, clouds that form large ice particles at high temperatures indicate high precipitation efficiency. This principle can be used for assigning relative rainfall amounts for clouds having the same physical dimensions.

Inferring precipitation forming processes from satellite retrieved T-re relations The sensors on board the recent satellites have a family of spectral bands in the solar and terrestrial portion of the radiation spectrum. For example, the geostationarry Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite has 12 spectral bands, from which cloud composition can be retrieved. These channels, 2.1 and 3.8 m in particular, make it possible to measure parameters such as thermodynamic phase and re in addition to visible reflectance and the thermal emission temperature. Much more information about the cloud microstructure and precipitation forming processes in convective clouds can be obtained from analyses of complete cloud clusters, residing in areas containing thousands of satellite pixels. The underlying assumption is that the microphysical evolution of a convective cloud can be represented by composition of the instantaneous values of the tops of convective clouds at different heights. This is based on the knowledge that cloud droplets form mainly at the base of convective clouds, and grow with increasing height or decreasing T. The form of dependence of re on T contains vital information about the cloud and precipitation processes, as described below. The T-re relations are obtained from an ensemble of clouds having tops covering a large range of T. Usually many pairs of T-re for each 1oC interval are observed in a region containing a convective cloud cluster. The points with smaller re for a given T are typically associated with the younger cloud elements, whereas the larger re for the same T are associated with the more mature cloud elements, in which the droplets growth had more time to progress by coalescence, and ice particles had more time to develop. Therefore, it is useful to plot not only the median value of T-re relation, but also, say, the 15th and 85th percentiles, for representing the younger and more mature cloud elements within the measurement region. Based on the shapes of the T-re relations, Rosenfeld and Lensky (1998) defined the following five microphysical zones in convective clouds:

1)

Diffusional droplet growth zone: Very slow growth of cloud droplets with depth above cloud base, indicated by small -dre/dT.

2)

Droplet coalescence growth zone: Large increase of the droplet growth with height, as depicted by large -dre/dT at T warmer than freezing temperatures, indicating rapid cloud-droplet growth with depth above cloud base. Such rapid growth can occur there only by drop coalescence. Rainout zone: A zone where re remains stable between 20 and 25 m, probably determined by the maximum drop size that can be sustained by rising air near cloud top, where the larger drops are precipitated to lower elevations and may eventually fall as rain from the cloud base. This zone is so named, because droplet growth by coalescence is balanced by precipitation of the largest drops from cloud top. Therefore, the clouds seem to be raining out much of their water while growing. The radius of the drops that actually rain out from cloud tops is much larger than the indicated re of 20-25 m, being at the upper end of the drop size distribution there.

3)

4)

Mixed phase zone: A zone of large indicated droplet growth with height, occurring at T<0C, due to coalescence as well as to mixed phase precipitation formation processes. Therefore, the mixed phase and the coalescence zones are ambiguous at 0<T<-38C. The conditions for determining the mixed phase zone within this range are specified in Rosenfeld and Lensky (1998).

5)

Glaciated zone: A nearly stable zone of re having a value greater than that of the rainout zone or the mixed phase zone at T<0C.

These zones are idealizations. Not all clouds conform to this idealized picture. The transition between the coalescence and mixed phase zones, which are not separated by a rainout zone, cannot be determined, and are therefore set arbitrarily to 6C in accordance with aircraft observations. The height of the glaciation zone can be overestimated in the cases of highly maritime clouds that grow through a deep rainout zone, because the scarcity of water in the super cooled portions of the clouds causes small ice particles, which sometimes can be mistaken for a mixed phase cloud. Addition of more spectral bands can help in separating the water from the ice, irrespective of the particle size. On the other hand, in vigorous clouds with active coalescence the height of the glaciation zone can be underestimated, because the high amounts of large ice hydrometeors dominate the radiative properties of the clouds, even when they co-exist with cloud super cooled water.

General
-40 -30 -20 T [ C] -10 0 10 20 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 r [ m] eff
o

Maritime
-40 -30 Glaciated

Glaciated

-20 T [ C] -10 0 10 20 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 r [ m] eff

Glaciated Mixed Phase
o

Mixed Phase Rainout Coalescence Diffusional growth

Mixed Phase Rainout Coalescence

Continental - moderate
-40 -30 -20 T [ C] -10 0 10 20 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 r [ m] eff
o

Continental - extreme
-40 -30

Glaciated Mixed Phase Coalescence Diffusional growth

-20 T [ C] -10 0 10 20 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 r [ m] eff Diffusional growth

o

Fig. 1: The classification scheme of convective clouds into microphysical zones, according to the shape of the T-re relations. Note that in extremely continental clouds re at cloud base is very small, the coalescence zone vanishes, mixed phase zone starts at T<-15oC, and the glaciation can occur in the most extreme situation at the height of homogeneous freezing temperature of 38oC. In contrast, maritime clouds start with large re at their base, crossing the precipitation threshold of 14 m a short distance above the base. The deep rainout zone is indicative of fully developed warm rain processes in the maritime clouds. The large droplets freeze at relatively high temperatures, resulting in a shallow mixed-phase zone and a glaciation temperature reached near 10oC (From Rosenfeld and Woodley, 2003).

All these microphysical zones are defined only for convective cloud elements. Multilayer clouds start with small re at the base of each cloud layer. This can be used for

distinguishing stratified from convective clouds by their microstructure. Typically, a convective cloud has a larger re than a layer cloud at the same height, because the convective cloud is deeper and contains more water in the form of larger drops. Additional vertical information can be obtained by using channels that penetrate to different depth below cloud tops (Rosenfeld et al., 2004). Chang and Li (2003) pioneered this concept using 1.6, 2.1 and 3.7 m channels of MODIS, retrieving the vertical profiles near the tops of stratiform clouds. In addition to the microphysical zones, it also can be determined that convective clouds start precipitating at re > 14 m (Rosenfeld and Gutman, 1994; Gerber, 1996). This can be used quantitatively for improving the accuracy of rainfall measurements from space, as demonstrated by Lensky and Rosenfeld (1997) for the NOAA/AVHRR. This principle was applied to an operational rainfall product (Ba and Gruber, 2001).

The dependence of rainfall remote sensing on hydrometeor size distributions The previous sections provided a physical basis for indirect measurements of precipitation based on the retrieved cloud top composition and temperature, using the visible and IR wavebands. Direct measurements of precipitation use the microwave frequencies that interact directly with the precipitation size particles (diameter > 0.1 mm). Direct measurements are divided into active and passive. Active microwave measurements require a radar instrument that transmits pulses of radiation and receives the back scattered echoes. The echo intensity is converted into precipitation intensity according to the radar equation. The backscatter occurs mainly in the Rayleigh regime, where the intensity of the scattered radiation is proportional to the 6th power of the particle size. This highly non-linear relation causes a serious problem of non-uniqueness between the echo and precipitation intensities. Small concentration of large hydrometeors can produce the same reflectivity factor (Z, [mm6m-3]) as much larger concentration of smaller hydrometeors that form much greater equivalent rain intensity (R, [mm hr-1]). This nonuniqueness in the Z-R relations has been historically the weakest point in radar rainfall measurements from both surface and space-borne platforms. Rainfall measurements from space with passive microwave rely on both thermal emission and back scatter. The thermal emission does not depend so strongly on the particle size, but because of that it cant distinguish between cloud water and precipitation. The thermal emission can be used mainly on the cold background of the oceans, which appear cold due to the small microwave emissivity of flat water surfaces. Most of the signal from deep convection comes from the backscatter of the upwelling thermal radiation back downward. This signal strongly depends on the particle size, as in the case for the radar. The larger the hydrometeors the more energy is backscatters to the surface and the lower the satellite measured brightness temperature becomes. It can be also viewed as larger particles backscatter more strongly the 3K background of the outer space, but it is inaccurate in a strict physical sense. Here again the same rain intensity that is associated with larger hydrometeors would be interpreted as stronger passive microwave signal and heavier rain. Ice hydrometeors are colder and have smaller emissivity than rain drops, and hence they would create lower brightness temperature for the same precipitation intensity, and more so when they reside higher in the cloud and at lower temperatures. Therefore, the correct interpretation into rainfall of both active and passive microwave measurements depends strongly on the relations between the hydrometeor size distributions, types and the rain intensity.

It is essential to obtain information about the hydrometeor sizes for achieving reasonable accuracy of the precipitation intensities. This can be achieved by space borne radar measurements with multiple wavelength radar, as planned for the Global Precipitation Mission. The already available space borne radar onboard the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite has only a single wavelength, and hence requires external independent information about the Z-R relations. Passive microwave measurements are conducted in several wavelengths simultaneously, but have very limited capability to resolve the particle size, especially in deep convective clouds.

Cloud microstructure and Z-R relationships In the previous section we have seen that independent external information on hydrometeors type and sizes is essential for improving the accuracy of both the radar and passive microwave precipitation measurements. Such information can be obtained from the inferred cloud microstructure and precipitation forming processes as obtained from the T-re relations. We will review here the precipitation evolution in microphysically maritime and continental clouds. Microphysically maritime clouds are composed of low concentration of large cloud drops that coalesce readily into warm rain. In contrast, microphysically continental clouds are composed of small drops that form precipitation mainly by ice processes. a. Microphysically maritime clouds: Evolution of warm rain In a hypothetical rising cloud column with active coalescence, the initial dominant process would be widening of the cloud drop size distribution into large concentrations of drizzle drops; the drizzle continues to coalesce with other drizzle and cloud drops into raindrops, which will continue to grow asymptotically to the equilibrium rain drop size distribution, with the median volume drop diameter D0e =1.76 mm (Hu and Srivastava, 1995). Therefore, during the growth phase of the precipitation particles the rain rate R increases with D0, median volume drop diameter, and this would increase D0 for a given R. Ideally, for rainfall with drops that fall from cloud top while growing, R would increase with the fall distance from the cloud top, mainly by growth of the falling drops due to accretion and coalescence, and to a lesser extent by addition of new small rain drops, until the raindrops grow sufficiently large for breakup to become significant. Shallow orographic clouds can present conditions such as some distance below the tops of convective clouds. Therefore, similar evolution of R can be observed on a mountain slope, such as documented by Fujiwara (1965). Different values of R near cloud top or in shallow orographic clouds can come mainly from changing NT, the total concentration of raindrops, because the drop size is bounded by the limited vertical fall distance along which they can grow. This would cause orographic precipitation to have small drops and for R to depend mainly on NT, and more so with shallower clouds and stronger orographic ascent, because the stronger rising component supplies more water for the production of many small raindrops not too far below cloud top, which are manifested as a larger R. b. Microphysically continental clouds: Evolution of cold rain Microphysically continental clouds are characterized by narrow cloud drop size distributions, and therefore having little drop coalescence and warm rain. Most raindrops originate from melting of ice hydrometeors that are typically graupel or hail in the

convective elements, and snowflakes in the mature or stratiform clouds. Graupel and hail particles grow without breakup while falling through the supercooled portion of the cloud, and continue to grow by accretion in the warm part of the cloud, where they melt. Large melting hailstones shed the excess melt-water in the form of a rain drop size distribution (RDSD) about which little is known. The shedding stops when the melting particles approach the size of the largest stable raindrops, which are later subject to further breakup due to collisions with other raindrops. In fact, new raindrops formation is limited only to the breakup of pre-existing larger precipitation particles. Therefore, we should expect that in such clouds there would be, for a given R, a relative dearth of small drops and excess of large drops compared to microphysically maritime clouds with active cloud drop coalescence. Deep continental convective clouds would therefore initiate the precipitation by forming large drops that with maturing approach DSDe from above. This is in contrast with the approach from below for maturing maritime RDSD. Recent satellite studies (Rosenfeld and Lensky, 1998) have shown that microphysically maritime clouds are associated typically with a rainout zone, i.e., the fast conversion of cloud water to precipitation cause the convective elements to lose water to precipitation while growing. This leaves less water carried upward to the super cooled zone, so that weaker ice precipitation can develop aloft. Williams et al. (2002) have recognized this as a potential cause to the much greater occurrence of lightning in continental compared to maritime clouds. Williams et al. (2002) noted that frequent lightning occurred also in very clean air during high atmospheric instability, probably because the strong updraft leaves little time to the formation of warm rain, and carries the large raindrops that manage to form up to the super cooled levels of the clouds, where they freeze and participate in the cloud electrification processes (Atlas and Williams, 2003). This difference between continental and maritime clouds means that mostly warm rain would fall even from the very deep maritime convection, which reaches well above the freezing level, whereas precipitation from continental clouds would originate mainly in ice processes. Therefore, the expected difference in RDSD between microphysically maritime and continental clouds is expected to exist also for the deepest convective clouds that extend well into the sub-freezing temperatures. c. Quantifying the role of cloud top re on RDSD The ultimate test for the role of cloud microstructure is comparing the RDSD of clouds at the same location, but at different times, when they possess maritime or continental microstructure. Rosenfeld and Ulbrich (2003) did exactly that. They used the VIRS (Visible and Infrared sensor) onboard TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) satellite to retrieve the microstructure of rain clouds over disdrometer sites. The clouds were classified into continental, intermediate and maritime, using the methodology of Rosenfeld and Lensky (1998). The RDSDs from the continental and maritime classes during the overpass time + 18 hours were lumped together and plotted in Fig. 2. Indeed, the continental and maritime RDSDs are well separated in Fig. 2, with the continental clouds producing greater concentrations of large drops and smaller concentrations of small drops. A comparison between the directly measured disdrometer rainfall and the calculated accumulation by applying the TRMM Z-R relations (Iguchi et al., 2000) to the disdrometer measured Z resulted in a relative overestimate by more than a factor of two of the rainfall from the microphysically continental clouds compared to the maritime clouds.

1000
Florida Cont Florida Mar LBA Cont LBA M ar India Cont India Mar Kw aj M ar

100

N [m m m ]

-3

10

0.1

0.01 0 1 2 3 4 5 6

D [m m ]

Fig. 2: Disdrometer measured RDSDs of continental (solid lines) and maritime (broken lines) rainfall, as microphysically classified by VIRS overpass. The RDSD is averaged for the rainfall during 18 hours of the overpass time, and the concentrations are scaled to 1 mm h-1. The disdrometers are in Florida (Teflun B), Amazon (LBA), India (Madras) and Kwajalein (From Rosenfeld and Ulbrich, 2003).

The evidence shows that it is mainly the cloud microstructure that is responsible to the large systematic difference in the RDSD and Z-R relations between maritime and continental clouds. There are several possible causes for these differences, all working at the same direction:

a. Extent of coalescence The cloud drop coalescence in highly maritime clouds is so fast that rainfall is developed low in the growing convective elements and precipitates while the clouds are still growing. The large concentrations of raindrops that form low in the cloud typically fall before they have the time to grow and reach equilibrium RDSD, thereby creating the rainout zone (Rosenfeld and Lensky, 1998) less than 2 km above cloud base height. Therefore, D0 remains much smaller than D0e, as was shown in Fig. 6b of Rosenfeld and Ulbrich (2003). In microphysically continental clouds with suppressed coalescence the cloud has to grow into large depth before start precipitating, by either warm or cold processes. The raindrops that fall through the lower part of the cloud grow by accretion of small cloud drops, so that they tend to breakup much less than drops that grow mainly by collisions with other raindrops, as is the case for maritime clouds. This process allows D0 to exceed D0e in the growing stages of the precipitation, and later approach it from above when the raindrop collisions become more frequent with the intensification of the rainfall. b. Warm versus cold precipitation processes The rainout of the maritime clouds (Rosenfeld and Lensky, 1988) depletes the cloud water before reaching the super cooled levels (Zipser and LeMone, 1980; Black and Hallett, 1986), so that mixed phase precipitation would be much less developed in the maritime clouds compared to the continental. This is manifested in the smaller reflectivity aloft in the maritime clouds (Zipser and Lutz, 1994), which is a manifestation of the smaller hydrometeors that form there (Zipser, 1994). In contrast, the suppressed coalescence in continental clouds leaves most of the cloud water available for growth of ice hydrometeors aloft, typically in the form of graupel and hail. These ice hydrometeors can grow indefinitely without breakup, until they fall into the warm part of the cloud and melt. The melted hydrometeors continue to grow by accretion of cloud droplets, until they exceed the size of spontaneous breakup or collide with other raindrops. Therefore, convective rainfall that originates as ice hydrometeors would have D0 > D0e, and would approach D0e from above with maturing of the RDSD. c. Strength of the updrafts Updrafts are typically stronger in more continental clouds, and therefore contribute to more microphysically continental clouds and less warm rain processes, as discussed already above. In addition, stronger updrafts allow drops with greater minimal size to fall through them. In addition, stronger updrafts leave less time for forming of warm rain and rainout, and advect more cloud water to the supercooled zone. Therefore, due to the reasons already discussed in (a) and (b), the stronger updrafts are likely to lead to precipitation with greater D0 and smaller R for the same Z. d. Evaporation More continental environments have typically higher cloud base and lower relative humidity at the sub-cloud layer. Evaporation depletes preferentially the smaller raindrops and works to increase D0.

Relations between precipitation measurement biases and cloud microstructure Now we can return and try explaining the large discrepancies between satellite measurements and rain gauge estimates that were found over central Africa, while in the Amazon regions the rain gauges coincide closely with satellite estimates (McCollum et al., 2000). This is consistent with the in situ microphysical observations showing that clouds in the Amazon are microphyiscally maritime, similar to equatorial pacific clouds (Stith et al., 2002), except for during periods when they are polluted by smoke from forest fires (Andreae et al., 2004). McCollum et al. (2002) have also shown that remote sensing of rainfall measurements by both passive microwave (SSM/I) and surface radar measurements have relative overestimate when moving from the east coast of the US to central US by 25% to 30% (See Fig. 3). McCollum et al. (2002) suggested that this bias is caused by the greater continentality of the rain clouds in central USA. When they used multispectral algorithm that takes into account cloud top microstructure the systematic bias somewhat decreased.

Fig.3. Spatial distribution of area-averaged multiplicative bias for the SSM/I with respect to the estimates of the bias-adjusted hourly digital precipitation radar rainfall estimates on a national grid (from McCollum et al., 2002).

Additional indication to the precipitation forming processes is the lightning activity. Clouds are electrified when graupel collides with ice crystals in a super cooled water cloud. Therefore lightning is a manifestation of intense ice precipitation forming processes. Tropical maritime clouds have between one and two orders of magnitude less lightning for the same amount of rainfall of continental clouds (Petersen and Rutledge, 1998). Satellite rainfall estimates in the Amazon regions and central Africa are comparable in magnitude, while there is much more lightning activity over central Africa with much less rain gauge measured rainfall. We postulate that rainfall regime over the Amazon is less microphysically continental than that over central Africa, and hence having smaller hydrometeors and larger extent of cold anvils for the same rainfall amounts. This suggestion is further supported by findings of Petersen and Rutledge (2001). A picture of the bias in the global tropics in relation to the clouds continentality is provided in Fig. 4. Greater continentality is characterized by larger amount of cloud water

carried up to the upper portions of the cloud, where it freezes and forms large ice hydrometeors, and the released latent heat of freezing invigorates the updrafts and loft the large ice particles to great heights (Andreae et al., 2004). The large ice particles aloft produce smaller passive microwave brightness temperatures that are interpreted as greater rain intensities, by a factor of 2 to 3 compared to the maritime clouds. The large raindrops that form when these ice particles melt equally cause radar overestimate of the rain intensities by a similar factor of 2 to 3 compared to the maritime clouds. As shown earlier in this chapter and elsewhere (Rosenfeld and Lensky, 1998; Andreae et al., 2004), the continetality of the clouds can be quantified independently of the radar by satellite retrieved T-re relationships.

Fig. 4: The measurement bias of the TRMM precipitation radar (PR, middle panel) and TRMM passive microwave (TMI, lower panel) in relation to the continentality of the rain clouds, as given by the mean 30 dBZ echo top height in precipitation features with TMI signal of ice scattering. Note the large overestimate where large ice hydrometeors exist high in the clouds. (Presented by S. Nesbitt at the TRMM Hawaii Scientific Conference, Honolulu, HI, 22-26 July 2002).

Fig. 5: Meteosat Second Generation image from 20 May 2003 13:42 GMT, over central Africa at a 1200X1200 km rectangle between 1-12N and 15-26E. The area shows the transition between the relatively microphysically maritime clouds over the forested area (dark surface) and microphysically continental clouds over the dry lands of the Sahel to the north (bright surface). The T-re relations of the continental clouds (1) show much smaller re for a given T compared to the maritime clouds (2). The median re of the maritime clouds (the yellow line) saturates near T=-20C, indicating glaciation at that temperature. The small median re at area 1 even above the -40C isotherm indicates homogeneous

glaciation of the cloud water and hence low precipitation efficiency. The color scheme is red for the visible, green for 3.9 m reflectance component, and blue for temperature. For full description and interpretation of the color table is given in Rosenfeld and Lensky (1998). The T-re lines represent percentiles of re for a given T in 10% steps for each line, between 5%-95%. The median is between the yellow and green lines.

Conclusions Differences in clouds microstructure can explain systematic biases of up to a factor of 3 in passive MW and radar direct rainfall measurements. The cloud microstructure can be obtained by T-re relations that are obtained from the operational NOAA orbital satellites. The Meteosat Second Generation, which was commissioned in early 2004, is the first of a new generation of geostationary satellites that have sufficient resolution for providing useful T-re relations of convective clouds (see example in Fig. 5). Combining the cloud's microphysical continentality from T-re analyses such as shown in Fig. 5 with the radar and passive microwave measurements has the potential of eliminating much of the measurement biases that are shown in Fig. 4. Night time capabilities for microphysical measurements are also emerging (Lensky and Rosenfeld, 2003a). Indirect rainfall measurements can be also substantially improved using the information about cloud top composition. Only the first steps have been done so far in this direction during daylight (Lensky and Rosenfeld, 1997; Ba and Gruber, 2001) and night (Lensky and Rosenfeld, 2003b). The implication for future missions is that rainfall measuring satellite should include both microwave and VIS/IR sensors, and the rain estimation should use this added information, without which systematic bias errors greater than a factor of 2 are difficult to avoid.

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