Rainfall over land from the AMSR-E

Significant improvements in the retrieval of instantaneous rain rates over land have occurred through the continued evolution of the Goddard Profiling Algorithm (GPROF), which has been used in the TRMM mission and most recently, the Aqua Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E). At present, GPROF V6 incorporates a probability of convective rain, in conjunction with a convective and stratiform set of rain radiance vectors, which are then used to compute a final surface rain rate. Preliminary results with TMI and AMSR-E over the United States in the instantaneous scale suggest low bias errors and high correlations when compared with rain gauge adjusted radar rainfall estimates. Discussion on the use of specialized ground validation sites at Eureka, California and Iowa City, Iowa are also presented.