Global millimeter-wave observations of precipitation using AMSU on the NOAA-15 satellite

This paper extends prior work on estimating instantaneous rain rates using data from the NASA Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) aboard the NOAA-15 satellite (Staelin and Chen, IEEE TGARS, vol. 38, pp. 2322-32, 2000) by utilizing more AMSU channels, training orbits, and seasons of the year, and by 1) inferring 15-km perturbations for the 50-km resolution channels, 2) adapting the algorithm to include cold dry atmospheres, 3) training using only the most reliable NOAA NEXRAD 3-GHz radar data, 4) applying the method to snowfall rate retrievals, and 5) preliminary global testing of the resulting algorithm over land and sea. The 15- and 50-km resolution algorithms were tested at AMSU rain rates up to 160 and 100 mm/h, respectively.