Satellite Rainfall

Monitering for Tropical

Flood Warning Flooding is a big problem:
particularly for developing countries like Malaysia,
where my project is going to be used, it can
destroy homes, food, and takes many lives each
year, so in order to identify and predict ooding we
have been writing a piece of software to measure
the current rainfall rate from satellite imagery, this
can then go to a model of the water system which
can predict the likelihood of oods.
The Himiwari 8 satellite is supplying
the images. It is a geostationary
satellite, which means it always
occupys the same point above the
Earth, at a height of around 36,000km,
it is collecting light at many dierent
wavelengths from the visible to the
infra red and sending this information
down to one of eOspheres
groundstations.

When light interacts with clouds it

doesn't all go through, dierent
wavelengths of light interact dierently
with dierent features of the
atmosphere, the background image of
this poster is a satellite image in an
infra red band over the Indian ocean,
the light reaching the sensor is almost
entirely that which reects of o water
vapour in the atmosphere, which is why
you can't see the surface of the Earth.
The temperature of each point is estimated
from the brightness of each pixel and that
allows us to tell the height and therefore the
chance of rain fall, the upper atmosphere is
cooler so water vapour condenses and it rains.
The algorithm I implemented in my project was
supplied by the EUMETSAT Satellite Application
Facility, they built a model of the atmosphere
and tted it to data from rain guages to predict
rain fall amount. I also wrote a program that
compares the temperature of many dierent
cloudy pixels, uses a statistical technique called
Baysian inference to compare these values to
rain guage data to create a piece of software
that can then predict rainfall from new data.