A Neural Network Approach to Estimate

Snowfall Parameters from Passive

Microwave Radiometer
Wei Huang∗
December 19, 2008

Abstract
Using space-borne passive microwave sensors to estimate snowfall for decades.
Thermal emission from the precipitating systems provides the basis to infer both
spatial and temporal intensity of snowfall. Both physical and statistical methods
have been applied to map the observed microwave radiance (brightness tempera-
ture) into snowfall. Physical inversion methods are based on forward modeling of
microwave radiative transfer through a model parameter space, the retrieval can
be achieved by finding the parameters that can provide smallest radiance difference
with the real observations; while statistical methods are based on direct relation of
microwave radiance and parameters observed from on-site snowfall gauge. In this
paper, a physically-based neural network approach is proposed. A 3-D precipita-
tion model are applied to generate the training set, a neural network is developed
to estimate the snowfall parameters from the real data. Comparisons with different
data set and methods are performed.

1 Introduction
The comprehensive measurement of precipitation is valuable for a wide range of research
area and related applications with practical benefits for human society. Due to the ability
of microwave radiation to penetrate clouds, space-borne, air-borne and ground based
passive and active observations in the microwave band have been used for estimation of
precipitation parameters over the last few decades ([1];[2]). Unlike air-borne and ground
based observation, space-borne microwave sensors are unique in being able to provide
maps of precipitation on global scales.
Quantitative retrieval methods of precipitation parameters through decoupling the
observed microwave signals are conveniently lumped into two basic categories: statistical
and physical. Statistical algorithms are those which are based primarily on empirically
determined relationships between satellite brightness temperatures and the parameters
to retrieved. Physical algorithms, on the other hand, depend on an accurate theoretical
Depart. of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, Univ. of Wisc at Madison. Contact email: huang-
∗

wei@aos.wisc.edu

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solution of the forward problem, that is, the prediction of brightness temperature from a
known state of the environment, coupled with some means for inverting the functional re-
lationship in order to estimate the precipitation parameters from the satellite observation.
Generally, different thermal sources contribute to the total signal of passive microwave
observation. The problem of microwave observation inversion to obtain the snowfall rate
is ill-posed, additional constrains has to be applied.
Passive microwave sensors have channels located at window frequencies, in which
the atmosphere is relatively transparent. As a result, the radiant energy observed by
the passive microwave sensors normally consists of some combination of surface emis-
sion/reflection and the integrated emission and attenuation occurring in the atmosphere.
In the process of retrieval of precipitation parameters, the surface spectral characteristics
need to be carefully treated in order to extract the signal that is exclusively related to
precipitation. Over land, surface emissivity is typically about 0.9, and generally shows
a large variability according to different surface type. Over the ocean, the situation is
quite different. Water surface have microwave emissivities which are both relatively low
(0.3 <  < 0.7) and highly polarized.
When precipitation presents, additional microwave radiances from precipitation hy-
drometeors contribute to the total radiances observed by passive microwave sensors. At
the window channels, rain attenuates and emits radiation more effectively than any other
atmospheric constituents. The emissivity of an optically thick rain cloud is more closer
to unity than that of the ocean surface; rain may normally be observed against the cold
ocean surface as a drastic increase in brightness temperature. Unlike the liquid precipita-
tion, the solid particles have a large single scattering albedo and can depress the observed
brightness temperature severely at higher frequencies. Estimations of snowfall were thus
focus on frequencies in 37 GHz and above.
The empirical retrieval method, which resort to the use of measurement of parameters
to be estimated and the observables(e.g. in the snowfall retrieval, surface snowfall rate
is the quantity to be estimated and brightness temperature is the observable), is limited
due to the lack of physical understanding of the problem. The physical retrieval methods
are typically based on the parameterization of precipitation microphysics and a set of
radiative transfer method. Furthermore, the retrieval of precipitation is generally based on
mapping the observed brightness temperature to the predefined model output brightness
temperature. It is apparent that, the quality of the physical retrieval generally depend of
the representness of the forward model and the optimal method that will applied to find
the solution of ill posed problem. However, the optimization process which is to find a
solution through a possible solution space is time consuming and can be formidable for
operational real-time snowfall retrieval ([4]). Neural network (NN) provides an alternative
to this kind of problem, although in the training stage computational time may be big
for NN method, once the NN is set up, the NN can work as a robust and efficient method
for estimation of snowfall rate.
The structure of the project is as follows: Sec.2 describes the major methodology,
Sec.3 gives the major result, Sec.4 presents the major conclusion.

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2 Methodology
As aforementioned, ice particles have relatively low emissivity and high single scattering
albedo, which makes snowfalls are only retrievable at higher frequencies. Also, in most
cases, the variability on surface type, water vapor, cloud vapor, makes the inversion of
snowfall rate from microwave brightness temperature a ill posed problem. The accuracy
of real case physical retrieval are particularly depend on the quality to represent the real
world snowfall of the pre-defined model space. The quality of the forward simulation is
quite another issue, which is out of the scope of this project. To overcome the modeling
problem, snowfall on ocean surface was selected for this study. The ocean surface is
relatively well known and can be modeled with relatively high accuracy in comparison to
that of land.
There are large amount of snowfalls near Wakasabay near Japan in the winter time.
The primary mechanism of the intensive, large scale snow fall is the heating of cold air
from the continent by the relatively warm ocean surface. Large sets of historical data are
available for both validation and research purpose. A numerical weather prediction model
WRF was applied to generate 3D distribution of snowfall near Wakasabay in 12/19/2003.
A Monte-Carlo method by Petty [3] was adopted to generate the 2D brightness temper-
ature at 18.7, 36.5 and 89.0 GHz, which is comparable to that of Adanced Microwave
Scanning Radiometer (AMSR). Real data set for AMSR in 12/25/2005 near Wakasabay,
as well as the radar retrieved snowfall rate which were supposed to be the ground truth
for researcher in meteorology field, were used as testing case. The overall pattern of the
two precipitation process do not differ too much, which facilitate the retrieval process by
training NN to the model. For this radiometric application, a feed forward neural net-
work are chosen , which has a layer of No observables and a hidden layer of neurons with
tan-sigmoid transfer functions and Nh hidden layer with a linear transfer functions and
1 output neuron for the snowfall rate estimation. The neural network was setup by the
standard Matlab package. Instead of the standard back-propagation, for a faster training,
the Levenberg-Marquardt method algorithm was selected for training stage. Results and
discussion are shown in following sections.

3 Results and Discussion

Different neural network configurations are selected to tested the validity of the NN
method used in these study. The first experiment is the selection of feature vectors.
Since the brightness temperatures are the combination of different thermal sources, the
frequencies that are most related to the snowfall need to be determined so as to gain a
better result. Once the proper feature space is decided, the configuation of the NN, such
as the number of the hidden layer, has to be tested.
The simulated brightness temperature field are shown in Fig. 1, and snowfall rate
through NN are shown in Fig. 2. The result of the numerical experiment is presented
in Tab.1. Following features can be grasped from these experiments. Generally, larger
number of hidden layer can have a better prediction of the snowfall rate, e.g with the same
feature vectors , the NN with larger number of hidden layer neurons perform better than
small number of hidden layer neurons. From the experiments, it is apparent that, the
snowfall rate is most correlated to high frequencies, adding higher frequency can generate

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 Frequency(GH) NN config Training Corr. Testing Corr.
18.7 1-4-1 0.6917 0.6036
18.7 1-15-1 0.7832 0.7151
36.5 1-4-1 0.9399 0.8898
36.5 1-15-1 0.9410 0.9203
89.0 1-4-1 0.8848 0.7626
89.0 1-15-1 0.9443 0.8485
18.7,36.5 1-4-1 0.9322 0.9210
18.7,36.5 1-15-1 0.9538 0.9320
36.5,89.0 1-4-1 0.9401 0.8917
36.5,89.0 1-15-1 0.9801 0.9533
18.7,89.0 1-4-1 0.9210 0.8736
18.7,89.0 1-15-1 0.9411 0.8910
18.7,36.5,89.0 1-4-1 0.9712 0.9328
18.7,36.5,89.0 1-15-1 0.9799 0.9412

Table 1: Different NN configuration and correlation with the real snowfall rate

better results. However, single frequency such as the 36.5, 89.0GHz can not provide a
global view of the response of snow to that of microwave. Only combined multichannel
retrieval can reach an acceptable result. Low frequencies, which are supposed to react
more to that of liquid cloud water, can sometime even lower the accuracy of the retrieval,
this might be the reason that, the structure of cloud layer can deviate from that of snowfall
area, thus make a noise term in the snowfall retrieval. It is also interesting that, adding
all the channels does not justify a increase of performance of the NN, which suggests that
selecting a good feature space may be a top issue.

4 Conclusion
From the study above, it can be conclude that, the NN provide a fast and statistical basis
that the accuracy of which can be comparable to conventional optimization process. The
NN method has the advantage that, once NN is set up, no exhaustive computational time
has to be consumed in order to achieve acceptable results. However, the NN in nature
provide a more accurate optimization problem, the quality of the forward model is the
key part in the snowfall retrieval.

References
[1] R. F. Adler, C. Kidd, G. Petty, M. Morrissey, and H. M. Goodman. Intercomparison
of global precipitation products: The Third Precipitation Intercomparison Project
(PIP-3). Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 82(7):1377–1396, 2001.

[2] C. Kidd. Satellite rainfall climatology: A review. Int. J. Clim., 21(9):1041–1066, July
2001.

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Figure 1: Brightness temperature at 36.5 and 89 GHz on vertical and horizontal polar-
ization

[3] G. W. Petty. Physical retrievals of over-ocean rain rate from multichannel microwave
imagery. Part I: Theoretical characteristics of normalized polarization and scattering
indices. Meteorol. Atmos. Phys., 54(1-4):79–100, 1994.

[4] G. W. Petty. Physical and microwave radiative properties of precipitating clouds.

Part II: A parametric 1d rain-cloud model for use in microwave radiative transfer
simulations. J. Appl. Meteor., 40(12):2115–2129, 2001.

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 A B

C D

Figure 2: (A.) NN on the training set. (B.) True mapping of snowfall rate in the training
stage (C.) NN on the real set (D.) True mapping of snowfall rate in the testing stage