Data sub-setting, re-sampling and co-registration for calibration of the TRMM space-borne radar using validation observations from ground-based radars

For the purpose of calibrating the TRMM spaceborne rain radar with ground-based radar observations, an approach to construct data subsets of TRMM precipitation radar and ground-based radar data is presented. Given the area-coverage and resolution of both systems, a reasonable starting point is to consider a 3 dimensional cube, 400 km long in the satellite ground-track direction, 400 km wide in the cross-track direction, and 20 km in altitude, composed of unit cells 5 km×5 km×1 km (along-track, cross-track, vertical). Each over-pass of a ground validation site by the TRMM satellite, consequently, results in an 80×80×20 cube of data points, or 256 Kbytes of data assuming 2 byte integer data