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

Promising agreement over land and sea has been obtained between NEXRAD 3-GHz radar observations of precipitation rate and retrievals based on simultaneous passive observations at 50-191 GHz from the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) on the NOAA-15 meteorological satellite. This paper extends prior work by increasing the number of inputs into the feed-forward neural network used for estimating precipitation. It also is based on a much larger and more representative training and evaluation data set that spans rain rates up to 80 mm/h and incorporates 22 rainy orbits distributed over a year